#doooongDaily

This one's a good one! With good headphones, it really sounds like there's a downpour outside. Good for focusing at work too, which is what I'm using it for right now.

Link: Stormy Weather

#Status #FocusMusic

I used to like Medium articles. Anything related to writing, marketing, or business, Medium was my go-to. However, too many paywalled articles and forcing you to register just to read the free articles turned me away from the site.

I do love Substack and there are many informative and thoughtful creators I follow. However, I don’t think I’m intelligent enough nor have the time to write such articles. Who knows, maybe in the future when I’m not so busy.

The main reason I choose Write.as for my primary blog is focusing solely on writing without worrying about click stats, email marketing, or selling a product or service. All my posts are free and they are not monetized. So enjoy, take what you can learn, and spread the word. And I will try to do the same with yours.

#writing #medium #substack

Something that has been keeping me busy in 2025 is an emerging audacious plan to buy a community building for our neighbourhood.

I live on the Tower Gardens Estate in Tottenham, north London – in the heart of one of the most deprived wards in one of the most deprived local authority areas in England. There is no easily accessible community space on our (large!) estate – and the one potential building – the old estate office, which was a Sure Start centre for a while – is now on Haringey’s disposals list.

A few of us have been working to cook up a plan to get this building and turn it into a community asset. The council are supportive of our plan but need us to raise the money to buy it from them. We think there’s huge potential, but we’re in the classic bind at the start of a project like this – we need money for commissioning our own valuation and condition surveys, and while we’ve done some super fun events (see pics!) to get ideas and opinions, there’s loads more co-design and broadening of our thinking we need to do.

We have such dreams for the building – a community garden, a library of things, a public living room, hireable community space, a music practice room, a community-led retrofit centre for the estate – but if we can’t raise money quickly (the end of the financial year?!) it will be put on the market and then who knows what will happen. Our current thinking is set out here.

We’ve launched a fundraiser to help cover initial costs – here – and we’re applying for as many pots of feasibility funding as we can. We’ve been knocked back from the AHF feasibility pot as the building isn’t listed (although it is an important building in an important conservation area!). I know this is a tight time of year and there are zillions of important places to put money. But I would love advice from the wise folk in my network about how we might get over this initial project start up funding hump.

We’ve got a great group and a decent plan, and I know that we can make something real happen here next year. Really happy to chat to anyone who might have leads on useful Haringey-based funding pots!!

What I meant to say to you all those years ago.

I met them in the margin of a used book,  next to difficult paragraphs  and subtle thoughts.

A penciled question mark  told me all I wanted to know ?  about their mind.

If I gave this book to a friend, I would have to tell them, “The marks are not mine.

“They are the marks of a mind, grappling, stretching, struggling.   In a word: reading.

“Though I will say I admire them for persevering with a book, with which they seem to disagree.

“When was the last time you read a book, whose message grated on you, ! and made you want to shut it?

“In this day in age, we put such stock in the cover in our hands and what it says about us.

“Maybe that is why, they put in those marks instead of giving up.

“In that case, I can't fault them. We do what we must to keep reading, when we know it is good for us.”

I suppose those marks in the margin, on the whole, though distracting, made me read deeper into a book

Which I was wont to accept without protest or criticism. Thank you, friend, ☺

For making my mind sharper. If we ever meet,  I hope I can return the favor.

#poetry

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I hope you enjoyed this “sequel” to my original short poem In the Margin. I have been reading a book of Robert Frost poems, and have come to really enjoy his deceptively simple dialogue. This was my attempt to adapt the technique, and I hope you liked it.

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Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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Reflecting on 2025 and what I’ve learned this year!

Some key highlights

Making a podcast, obviously! Getting Corporate Bodies out into the world has been a real joy. Getting to work with Mark again and to have some profoundly deep and interesting conversations with very wise and wonderful people has stretched my brain and ambitions in all sorts of ways. Check it out if you haven’t already, I am very proud of it.

The patient, mature and expansive work I’ve had the honour to be part of at Catalyst, as we move to close the CIC. There’s a mix of fierce clarity, recognising that the right path is one of careful closure, and excitement of seeing that we can have a bigger impact by closing proactively and redistributing our remaining funds. There’s obviously also some grief and sadness as Catalyst is one of the most values-led and expansive organisations I’ve been part of – but I know its ripples will continue to expand.

My freelance practice is really starting to take shape! I’ve loved helping organisations and teams conjure the future, building emergent strategies and healthy cultures together. The mix of 1:1 and team coaching, strategy consultancy and facilitation is really energising, and I’ve loved being able to bring together and use frameworks like Three Horizons, Deep Democracy, permaculture and sociocracy, with a nice dose of sci-fi thrown in. I will have some capacity in the new year so if you’d like to chat about how I can work with you, get in touch!

Things are going from strength to strength at Digital Commons, and the addition of the wonderful Sara and Carmen to the team has been really impactful. Building the tech infrastructure that social movements need is hard and slow work, but it’s beginning to emerge – check out the latest updates to LandExplorer.coop, and keep your eyes open for some of the outputs for our Data for Housing Justice collab with Shared Assets early next year…

And – last but not least – I’ve absolutely relished the power of being away from my kitchen table and sharing a lovely space with the wonderful Beth and Deepa – check out the view from my desk! Being in a place where things are being made every day really helps me stay grounded, and integrating a mini-commute into my days has helped hugely with my mental health. Strong recommend!!

![Deepa's work](https://i.snap.as/K75Hy3vv.jpg)

Report by Milan Đorđević, Tijana Cvetković & Noa Treister

Building the cooperative did not begin with a strict program but with a series of conversations about how artists might reorganise their work and the relationships around it. So, this text turns to one specific attempt to rethink artistic exchange and the conditions under which art is produced and circulated in Serbia.

Our research study within the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS, 2023) has shown that the visual arts field is marked by a high level of centralisation, dependence on a few major institutions, and the gradual erosion of public cultural infrastructure. As market logic expanded into areas once shaped by collective investment, cultural participation narrowed, particularly for the working class. In such a landscape, artistic value tends to be defined by visibility and demand rather than by social relevance. This is the background against which we began to explore whether practices of exchange outside the monetary frame might open different relationships between art and its surroundings.

In defining the scope and modes of operation of the co-op, we began to experiment with barter as a tool for rethinking exchange. The question we placed at the centre of this process was simple but fundamental: how can barter, as a form of non-monetary exchange, function both as a critique of existing art economies and of the way they define the role of art and artists in society, while also prefiguring alternatives?

Our first public experiment was conducted in Požega in the autumn of 2025, under the title Ponudi, razmeni, ponesi – Offer, Exchange, Take Away. Visitors were invited to offer something of their own in return for an artwork. It could be a haircut, a home-cooked meal, help with repairs, a professional service in a non-art-related field, or money if they wished. The format resembled an auction, but its rhythm and meaning were different. Each artwork was accompanied by space for offers; after the exhibition closed, the artists reviewed the proposals and decided which to accept.

The exhibition took place in a space that had previously been a hair salon in the centre of Požega. It had been empty for months, and the owner was considering turning it into an art space. That circumstance gave us a kind of freedom that is rare when working within established institutions. There were no curatorial or administrative expectations, only the practical question of how to make the exchange visible and accessible. We organised the exhibition to be open a few afternoons and evenings during a period of three weeks. A person from the local community was engaged for a modest fee to keep the space open, welcome visitors, and explain how to make an offer and how the exchange would unfold. At the same time, we promoted the event through social media, direct letters sent to local entrepreneurs, and through personal networks. In small towns like Požega​​ (≈12,300 inhabitants), we realised that word of mouth still functions as the most effective form of public communication – slower but more durable than any campaign. By the end of the three weeks, around fifty people had visited the space, and several of them made their offers.

After the exhibition, we gathered for a workshop that opened one of the most persistent questions among artists: how to define the value of one’s own work. Most participants admitted they find it difficult to put a price on something that does not fit into standard market categories. One artist said she rarely sells her work as an object, and that her decisions depend on “who approaches her and whether they understand each other”. Others spoke about the challenge of balancing artistic integrity with livelihood. As one participant noted, “you can’t measure everything in hours, but you can’t ignore the time and materials either”.

For us, this conversation was central. A cooperative is not built around the idea of profit but around the need for sustainability. As we discussed, we don’t have to be profit-oriented, but we do have to cover our basic living costs. This simple statement cuts through much of the ambiguity that surrounds the notion of artistic value. It recognises that art, like any form of labour, depends on material conditions, but also that value is not fixed – it is negotiated in relation to others, to context, and to shared purpose. And barter became a way to make these relations visible: a two-day truck trip to Durrës in Albania; twenty professional hair colorings and haircuts with no time limit; a curatorial text for the next exhibition; documentation for building legalisation up to 200 square metres; a personal herbarium; a weekend stay with breakfast for up to eight people, and many more proposals that carry different understanding of value and relation. None of them could be translated neatly into monetary terms, and that was precisely the point. The exchanges showed what people were ready to give and how they imagined their connection to art, as care, as time, as skill, as hospitality. Whether professional artistic work becomes a matter of survival arithmetic (as was mentioned during the workshop) or remains unrecognised as labour, the question is the same: how to live from what one creates. As one artist put it, few people see art as work at all, and that is precisely where the cooperative finds its role – to shift perception and rebuild the link between artistic value and the conditions of life that sustain it.

Even though some visitors offered money for the artworks, the non-monetary exchanges shaped the atmosphere of the event in a different way. Instead of fixed prices, artists provided approximate starting points for negotiation, which opened space to focus less on monetary value and more on the people who approached them. Buyers were no longer anonymous figures but individuals whose interests, skills or forms of care said something about why they wanted a particular work. Several artists accepted offers that were modest or unconventional, simply because they felt a sense of recognition in them. From a conventional entrepreneurial standpoint, accepting less than the assumed market value might be seen as diminishing one’s worth, but this concern did not play a central role here. The exchange was not framed as a market transaction to be optimised, but as a space in which value could be shaped through relation rather than price. That shift loosened the usual distance between artist and audience and made the encounter feel grounded in mutual attention instead of market logic.

The co-op should bring artistic labour back into the everyday economy of life and exchange, without romanticising precarity or denying the need for income. Its way of selling art should test how art might live when its value comes from relations rather than from market recognition. This intention became clearer when we proposed to repeat the experiment in one of the central art spaces in Serbia. The response from its curators exposed precisely the tension we wanted to address. They worried that the idea of exchanging artworks for homemade goods or services could “devalue” art and “encourage amateurism”. Their concern was not unique; it reflected a broader institutional anxiety about how artistic value is defined and protected in a system that already struggles to sustain its own workers.

What the experiment left us with was not a ready-made model but a clearer sense of the questions that need to be worked through: how to organise exchanges that recognise artistic labour without falling back on market metrics; how to involve communities without reproducing hierarchies; and how to build structures that make such practices sustainable rather than exceptional. For the next iteration of the exhibition, we turned to a public library in Bor, a mining town with a growing community of Chinese workers, as a place to continue the experiment. The interest shown by artists during the open call, their questions, suggestions, and willingness to engage even when they could not participate, confirmed that the need for such spaces is real. Rather than closing a cycle, the workshop and exhibition in Požega marked the beginning of a longer process; in the coming period, we plan to develop a series of these kinds of events that deepen this exploration of alternative economies of art.

JOURNAL 16 décembre 2025 Introspection

C’est revenu le temps du kotatsu : ma princesse et son laptop, moi les coudes autour d’un bouquin (je tiens ma tête les coudes sur la table). On a baissé la lampe pour être bien éclairées, A porte des lunettes pour travailler, elle ne veut pas que je me fatigue les yeux. On a mis les hanten doublés Ça c’est le décor.

Dans ma tête c’est moins clair J'ai plus eu de cauchemar depuis je sais pas et plus d’hallucinations non plus. Je me sens beaucoup plus stable, plus tranquille. Je m'endors sans crainte.

Mes psys me disent que je n'ai pas fini. Je veux bien le croire, puisque je n’arrive pas à en parler avec mon frère, pourtant je crois que mon interprétation est juste, alors qu'est-ce qui ne va encore pas? C'est vrai j’ai reçu ces coups et ces brimades comme une preuve d'intérêt alors que je me croyais inexistante. J'en ai même été fière. C’est dingue hein ? C’est vrai. J’ai fait plus que supporter, j'ai aimé ça. Je trimbalais mes marques comme des médailles, j'étais fière de savoir endurer.

Dans le hokkaido ils ne m’ont jamais sorti un cri, peut-être des gémissements que j'arrivais à étouffer. C'était comme un défi. Quand on m'a violée je n’ai pas pu retenir des larmes, mais pas un son, je le sais, on m'a forcée à voir les vidéos ignobles, ils me traitaient de petite salope, petite arrogante, petite aristo de merde. Ils me tiraient les cheveux. Ça les mettait en rage, et moi pas un son et je baissais pas les yeux. Ils devenaient fous, je recevais des gifles, des raclées, ils me jetaient par terre… Bref Alors quoi maintenant, qu'est-ce qui manque ? Qu'est-ce qui est enfoui si profondément que je ne vois rien ressortir, pas un indice. Mes psys semblent avoir une idée mais peut-être bien qu'ils bluffent, je suis seule en face de cette question. Pourquoi je n’ose pas en parler à mon frère ? Pourquoi je n’ose pas de lui dire que j'ai aimé sa tyrannie violente ? Pour pas perdre mon statut de victime héroïque ? — Tu parles comme je m'en fous Je ne comprends pas Je ne vois pas où est le point. Ma chérie ne peut plus rien pour m'aider, bien qu'elle voudrait tellement. Personne ne peut plus rien. C'est entre moi et moi, merde alors.

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The rain sizzled against my exposed cybernetic forearm, the hydraulics whining like a dying dog. Across the street, the target’s retinal implants flickered—glitchy. Cheap knockoffs. “You gonna pull that trigger or philosophize all night?” growled my onboard AI, its voice sandpaper-rough from last week’s malware attack. The .357 Magnum trembled in my grip, not from fear but from the feedback loop—their tech was inside me now. The target smiled, lips splitting like overripe fruit. “We’re the same, Murphy.” Wrong. I was 37% meat. The gun roared. His skull splintered like cheap polymer. Another ghost in the machine.

#Scratch

tal parece que al que socava alguien le ayuda y así vamos por la empinada cuesta regañados de esperanzas entre brumas

E and I had an issue again about therapy, and how she forgot about why it was important in the first place, and how she had not put in effort for it. It hurt a lot because early on in our relationship, she did something really bad that hurt my trust a lot, and we almost broke up over it. We agreed that if she went to therapy, then I would feel comfortable and could trust her again. It’s been almost 3 months, and it hasn’t been a good look. It honestly hurt a lot, and also the way that she handled it. I broke down crying for almost an hour. She also talked with her mom about it, and explained only the fact that I wanted her to get therapy, and not why, or explaining the “problems” that we had. Not the fact that she did something super fucked up and that would have been normally grounds for breaking up, and how this was something we both agreed upon as a way to show that things like that wouldn’t happen again. I feel this horrible pit in my chest, and it threatens to constrict me fully. It’s such a powerless position to be in to see a situation be represented so one-sided to a very biased jury, and to be helpeless other than to just watch.

In Summary: * A pretty good Monday, though it stll feels odd not to have this as a big laundry day. My chess load may be bigger now than it has ever been. With several tournaments running in my different online chess clubs, I have between 50 and 60 games to work on every day. That's about the maximum number I can handle.

Prayers, etc.: * My daily prayers

Health Metrics: * bw= 222.67 lbs. * bp= 158/93 (68)

Exercise: * kegel pelvic floor exercise, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 blueberry muffin * 06:45 – 1 more blueberry muffin, 1 bowl of oatmeal * 08:05 – baked salmon w. mushroom sauce * 12:30 – noodles and cheese sauce * 16:45 – 1 more blueberry muffin

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:15 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources * 12:30 to 14:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 16:20 – listening to The Jack Riccardi Show * 17:00 – listening to The Joe Pags Show * 18:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 20:00 – listening to relaxing music and quietly reading until bedtime

Chess: * 16:15 – moved in all rated CC games

Desire is not failure. It is the body remembering it was made to be touched.

A wolf prowls Porto— not vicious, but hungry— moving through stone and salt and old iron streets.

This morning he finds himself still, at a hotel bar, the city passing through him rather than the other way around.

His usual den—the bank where wild thyme grows, where oxlips and violet nod beneath woodbine and musk-rose— This dawn there are others here, And it belongs now to those.

The flower room, the mortals call it.

It fills with silk and chiffon, with the soft architecture of bodies in motion. Bare shoulders. Open backs. Arms meeting torsos without shame. Hems rising like a tide that does not ask permission.

The wolf does not consume. He observes. His gaze is sufficient.

Peeling from the dense joinery of bodies, a man slips away to the bar. He is suited, befitting a man of some renown, though the wolf knows nothing of it—only the sense that he carries a certain gravity.

He takes a seat and drinks as if he has run aground, as if breath itself might be returned to him through glass and foam. Perhaps it is less thirst for spirits and more the calm draw of the tender— a young woman whose skin glows in the low light, smoked honey, warm and quiet, with a smile that could hold a Rabelo steady against wind or current.

The man mutters something, coyness flickering in his eyes. Smoked honey answers with that smile and a single word.

“Nepal.”

A moment opens.

Will the man hunt? Or is he only being kind?

It hangs, full and unresolved— no bridge built, only the long chasm of silence where two observers stand stunned by the distance and depth between them.

A distant wind, like a dream, sprinkles the whispered word Namaste. But the moment has passed. Smoked honey returns to polishing her crystal treasures.

Nothing passes between them, and so the air holds what might have been.

There is a pressure now that did not exist a moment before— sustained, contained, with nowhere yet to go.

Then the room changes.

Not suddenly. Not loudly. But profoundly.

A woman enters, and the space rearranges itself around her. Energy shifts outward, displaced, as her presence stirs a wind that moves the sage and trembles the wheat.

Even the wolf, in his quiet corner, feels it.

Gravity has slipped— just a little.

She does not drift. She does not search.

She approaches with intent.

Her dress—midnight blue, scattered with small white flowers, like a third-watch meadow under a full moon— clings to her skin without effort, remembering her shape as she moves.

She comes to rest beside the man, close enough that breath becomes shared. The wolf senses the change in him— a soft yielding, almost imperceptible. He is opening. She unarmors him with little more than awareness.

Her hand rises.

Not to seize. Not to hold.

To settle.

Fingers find the back of his head, knitting briefly into short dark hair. A palm rests at the nape of his neck, where a pulse answers without words.

And in that answering, the room dissolves.

This is not conquest. Nor possession, asserted or implied.

It is awareness without declaration.

The wolf is awed by the slow, unmistakable alignment of want and permission.

The resonance reaches him. His breath deepens. His weight shifts forward a fraction, as if his body remembers this language without ever being addressed.

And there, behind his ribs, the wolf finds it— a longing oft felt and long quelled.

Not the sex— but the recognition. The unfiltered want between two.

Desire moves like heat through matter, lingering, spreading, until something softens and opens enough to receive it.

The wolf realizes he is open and unnamed, still wanting— not because he lacks, but because the wanting itself has warmed him, has replaced ache with presence, and left him altered by what passed through the room when someone disarmed and let themselves be found.

• 👕 I promised myself that the reward for completing the 750 Words private journaling last month was to buy myself an Iron Maiden t-shirt. I used to have one way back then, and I just had this wish to wear one again. So I did it! I found a local store that still sells licensed rock/metal bands t-shirts and got a pair (I wanted to avoid buying online).
• ☑️ I noticed that the Nirvana app was looking a bit more colourful than usual. So, the iOS version already had colours on the menu and now that is matched on the web and also on the Windows app. Cool!
• ⏰ I sometimes wish Nirvana offered stronger reminders. Or at least a quicker way to add simple ones and receive persistent notifications. To fill that gap, I’ve been using the Reminders app on my phone, or occasionally Microsoft To Do, since both make it much easier to add a reminder. And that brings me to…
• 🐧 ... I want to try out Linux again. It's been years since I've been on Linux, and now I feel like I have the headspace to start my switch from Windows to Linux. I don't have major issues with Windows 11 at the moment, other than how bloated it has become, the endless updates that appear out of nowhere and take forever to finish, the constant insertion of Copilot AI buttons everywhere I look, and an overall concern about privacy and how little control I have over my own desktop. (Well, those might actually be Major problems!). I’m not extreme when it comes to privacy or ideology. I just want the bare minimum: a fast, predictable system that stays out of my way, lets me decide what runs on my machine, and doesn’t treat my computer like an advertising surface.
• 🎓 I finished an online course that was offered by my company about Leadership: “Harvard ManageMentor (HMM) Leadership Experience”. It was okay, I got somethings out of it. There was an author interviewed talking about anxiety and I identified with her ideas. I'm reading her e-book “The Anxious Achiever” by Morra Aarons-Mele. It is helping me recognize anxiety as a manageable personality trait rather than a problem to solve. Anxiety might be part of my personality. And that's okay, as long as I understand it and learn how to manage it. It can help me sometimes, and in the moments where it hinders me, I can use tools to mitigate it.
• 🎉 Me and my partner attended my company's Holiday Party, which was nice. We are not party people at all, but this one has become a tradition for us. And one thing I like to do is wear the same dress every year, to kinda prove that we don't need (especially women) to have a different outfit every fricking event we go to! It may be a women's thing, but there is a lot of pressure for us to “dress pretty” and god-forbid if we wear the same dress! I've been wearing the same outfit since 2018, and I was not excluded from society.
• 🎿 I enrolled in Intro Cross Country Ski Classes that will start early January! I finally moved this project from my Someday/Maybe! Now I need to get some skis, but I'll wait until the craziness of Christmas shopping season is over. I'm super excited about skiing! I have no clue how it works.

📌 Cool online reads:

• Desert Island games (feat. some of you!) by Joel: This is an awesome post with the collaboration of a bunch of people talking about video games (including me!). It’s a great list and Joel’s comments are super fun, I had a great time. Go read it!
• My approach to GTD – capturing | zkbro: I loved this todo.txt style system using Obsidian, mixing the PARA method and daily notes. I am following to read the rest of the series of posts about this GTD system.
• My approach to GTD – processing | zkbro: This is post 02 of the above, talking about processing. It’s very complete with contexts and priority tags.
• IndieWeb Carnival: where do I wish to see the IndieWeb in 2030 – Manu: Some interesting reflections here. The one that most caught attention is the tendency of creating or replicating major corporate platforms rather than creating something genuinely different. I honestly feel that Mastodon resembles Twitter too much, and I always wonder what could be different?
• A roadmap of the Roman Empire – 82MHz: So interesting to know about Itiner‑e, a project mapping all the roads of the Roman Empire, essentially a “Google Maps” of antiquity. Andreas is so lucky to be near an actual ancient Roman road. It feels so special to me to be in archaeological sites or heritage buildings. Fascinating!

📺 Videos I enjoyed:

• A Brief History of the Concert Film by Polyphonic: I’ve been watching a lot of recordings of live performances, so this was a nice video that goes back into the origins of recording live music and creating these films.
• Heisenberg Made a Discovery in 1925. We Still Can't Explain It by PBS Space Time: Quantum Physics is crazy and amazing!
• The Windows 11 Crisis by ColdFusion: this video encouraged me to start thinking about Linux again, after years being in the Microsoft environment. I used to be a minor Linux enthusiast, having set up dual boot gaming desktops back in the day where I couldn’t play games on Linux. Well, now the reasons not to use Linux feel smaller than ever, and the reasons to leave Windows feel harder to ignore.

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#weeknotes