2025 / #08: All the Apps

It’s been about a week since I started my “Digital Declutter”, so I wanted to reflect on how it’s going.

I’ll admit – it was surprisingly difficult to start. It was the day after my birthday, and I was still getting late messages on Instagram, and I had a moment where I thought – yeah, but here’s people trying to reach me. What if I miss more messages? Then I remembered that all these people have my phone number, and I can just continue the conversation there. So that’s what I did.

I made a hiatus post with this text, and I logged out of everything on all my devices.

Most of my life hasn’t changed – social media doesn’t play a big part in my life these days – but I found myself dealing with something half-forgotten: the anxiety of being alone with your thoughts.

I generally like being alone in my head, and I spend big chunks of the day by myself without my phone/laptop, simply thinking – sans input from other minds, as Cal Newport puts it – but those are planned. But now, say I was meeting a friend and they were a bit late, I’d look at my phone, realise there was nothing I could do on it, and then I’d have to put it away and just be, and that was far more anxiety-inducing than I’d expected.

The crucial thing social media uses against you psychologically is potentiality – someone could be trying to reach you, someone could be talking about you, something could be happening that you need to know about. In practice, we’ve spent enough time on these sites to realise that most of the time, nothing is happening. But that could be is where they get you.

Since we last spoke, the following stories I lettered have been released:

• The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos: Children of the Night #2 with James Tynion IV, Tate Brombal, Isaac Goodhart, Miquel Muerto (with a backup by Chloe Brailsford that I also lettered), from Dark Horse Comics.
• “Across the Room” in DC’s Kal-El-Fornia Love anthology, with Brandon Thomas, Juni Ba and Chris O’Halloran (reuniting the Boy Wonder team for a bit).
• w0rldtr33 #16 with James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco and Jordie Bellaire, from Image Comics.
• Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma #5 with Ram V, Anand RK and Mike Spicer, from DC Comics.

Work has been light for the last couple of weeks. I wrapped up the lettering for The Department of Truth #00 (the main story as well as the backup), the Monsters in Love backup for TOPLOCC: COTN #4. I’m currently plugging away at the next book-length instalment of Human Nature, which should be done in another week or so. It’s good to have a breather after the frantic working speed of May-July.

Writing-wise, SEASIDE is progressing nicely. The artist wrapped up thumbnails for the entire first issue. We also have a test page for the colours that we’re discussing right now. I’ve pasted in the lettering for the entire issue onto the thumbs and I’m revising the text based on the art (a handy thing I can do because I’m lettering myself). We might have a few more thumbnail revisions in the next week, but we’re mostly set, and the artist has started drawing the rest of the issue. This continues to be a phenomenally exciting process, and I get why people do this shit, you know.

And since this is my first big project as a writer, I wanted to do something special as a letterer as well. So, quietly, for the last couple of weeks, usually when I’m on a long call with a friend, I’ve been developing a new typeface to letter the book with. It’s based on a hand-lettering style I developed a few years ago but haven’t been able to use in anything (there were a couple of hand-lettering projects on the horizon some years ago, but those didn’t work out). It’s the same pen shape that I used on Blue in Green, but the skeletons are inspired by Bill Oakley and Ken Lopez’s angular, forward-looking styles from the ’90s. I’m planning for three versions of each uppercase letter that will be auto-replaced using OpenType features, plus two sets of lowercase letters. (The book will mostly be lettered in uppercase, but I wanted to have the option to drop down to lowercase for whispers and smaller exclamations like I do in books like TOPLOCC – I enjoy the visual variation that gives the lettering. When I started scripting this book, I toyed with using multiple speech registers like some writers do – Hickman’s use of italics, Si Spurrier’s parentheticals and lowercase asides – but the book’s tone largely resisted that.)

Here’s a quick glimpse of what it looks like – I’m thinking I’ll do a separate post about the development process of this in the next few weeks, as I get closer to finishing and testing it.

Links for the week:

• Everything Dead & Dying, the new comic I’m lettering, with Tate Brombal, Jacob Phillips and Pip Martin, is on final order cutoff now. Here’s a long post about it on the Tiny Onion newsletter, plus Dread Central has a great process post on some pages from the first issue.
• Elizabeth Godspeed on the increasing appropriation of public domain art for book covers.
• Scope of Work did a great article on how silica gel took over the supply chain.
• Wesley Osam did this great post last year on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and worldbuilding that I just reread and enjoyed.

I had a couple of short posts I’d planned to write during the week, but I got done with the bulk of this newsletter quite quickly, so I figured I’d just note them down here. Both are about tech/the Internet, one negative and one positive.

Pocket, possibly my most-used Internet app (I was routinely told in the year-end wrap-up that I was among the top 1% users), is shutting down. This is a huge pity, of course, but it is an inevitable result of the “algotorialisation” of the web – a term they use positively on the link, but which I think is poison. Everyone now wants to curate the web for you, via algorithms rather than humans, and it is therefore a problem that you were, thus far, allowed to choose what you read. So they’re taking the worst bit of Pocket – the recommendations page – and making it the only thing that survives into the next iteration.

I used to pay for Pocket, but this stuff started getting into my experience of the app, and I stopped. Instead, moved to Readwise, which is a paid-only bookmarking service, with a much better focus on the actual reading experience. It does provide AI summaries, which I ignore, but it also has auto-transcription of podcasts and videos, which I’m cautiously into (both of these are, as per our current use of the word, “AI”, but one is replacing something creative while the other is replacing something clerical). Readwise isn’t perfect either, but I trust a paid-only service over a freemium service to avoid getting acquired and eventually destroyed like they all do.

So the closure of Pocket doesn’t directly affect me, but it does make me feel sad – you used to be something, man.

The other thing – and I hate to give Apple credit for this – is that I recently discovered Apple’s Classical Music app, which comes bundled with my Apple One subscription (it’s also free if you pay for Apple Music).

I’ve recently moved away from Spotify because of its many terrible practices. I know Apple Music isn’t perfect either (a phrase I find myself repeating in this context), but it has lossless compression, and the experience of using it is oriented towards artists rather than genres and endless playlists, and therefore allows for an engagement with the music that goes beyond having it on in the background and not knowing who’s playing.

I’ve also, in doing so, decided to orient my listening around albums instead of shuffle – I reasoned that I engage with most other types of art as discrete units rather than textures applied to something else, so I should try to do the same for music (this is a thought to be expanded upon at some point, particularly given my recent read of Geeta Dayal’s monograph on Brian Eno’s Another Green World and my subsequent re-engagement with his music and his approach).

Every time I played a classical album or a film soundtrack, I noticed a 𝄞 symbol up top, something not present for regular albums, and after a few of these, I clicked on it, to find that it leads you to a whole separate app that is designed from the ground up to help you listen to classical music.

For one, pieces are grouped by composer rather than performer, and underneath, you have various performances to choose from, include an “editor’s recommendation” for the best one to start with. The more popular pieces have liner notes where usually you’d find lyrics, with commentary on the technical and artistic things the piece is doing. And the app doesn’t just have the classics – it’s got a bunch of modern classical music with curation and recommendations.

This feels like something that exists not for a commercial reason, but, like Apple TV+, because Tim Cook wants this kind of thing out in the world. It’s a positive example of modern-day patronage.

They don’t seem to be doing a great job of promoting it – same as Apple TV+, I guess – but I’m delighted this exists.

I think that’s a good place to stop for the week.

More later!