I have read The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz. You should read it too, it’s fantastic. I am now qualified to state: sound is weird. Hearing sound is stranger still. A florescent bulb sounds like a chainsaw to a fly. The sun would sound like a jackhammer but for the vacuum of space. This is surprising in the way that affects those people who haven’t thought about it before. There’s a line in the introduction where it’s said that to a frog, the sound of street traffic would be equivalent to a mid-range earthquake. Extended out to other animals, it’s worth considering that humanity and all the sounds our terrible machines produce are geological scale disaster volume-wise. After all, there’s been very little time for evolution to adjust to our roar. This becomes stranger when one considers the way a mammals ear works.
Sound occurs at the level f molecules. This bit of nitrogen bumps into this other bit and then oxygen and argon and whatever else is in the air between a source of noise and the apparatus that hears it. This is why it’s “silent” in space, too few molecules, at least for our ears. Think about how sound works for dolphins or whales, they hear well under water; there anatomy is adapted to it. We hear well in the atmosphere; our anatomy is adapted to it. Surely some Lovecraftian horror can hear well in space, with a hypothetical anatomy adapted to it. Consider Venice. It’s limestone buildings and low traffic streets conspire to absorb the vibrations the way that foam egg-carton stuff does in recording booths. It’s all physical, environment affecting sound at least as much as anatomy.
Technology can actively manipulate both, and that’s interesting. Sound itself can manipulate sound. If we have an audible thing and it’s particular waveform looks like peak, we hear that. If we add an audible thing to it and that things particular waveform look like a valley, an inverse of the peak, we hear nothing. That’s real, that’s how active noise cancelling works in headphones.
Now, I’m starting to conceive that anatomically someone could be missing the mechanical anatomy to hear the valley everyone else hears. Such a person wouldn’t hear silence like everyone else, they would hear something. I hope to hear nothing.
Things who speak, have a voice. Things who listen have ears, commonly two. A human head doesn’t seem particularly wide, though it’s wide enough for direction finding. Eyes are even closer together and still provide depth perception, after all. Somehow I have found myself in the position of needing to read about hearing. I seem to recall that I’ve gotten here by reading about perception and consciousness. There is something that it is like to be a blank, that sort of thing. From that ultrasound and infrasound, and moths with impaired hearing being more commonly predated by bats. Hunters and hunted evolved their capacities. Human people gained capacity via technological advancement. This compressed time. Now I need to know more about where we are. If it’s different from where we would be if we did things the natural way.
Unfortunately this borders on the wrong kind of field, the sort in which I want to cut no trails.
Safe routes should always be taken. Stick to the coastline. Keep it rooted in mechanics. Think about how physical it is. Focus on the externalities. Reject that which is perceived with one sense alone. Touch the wall for reassurance. Have a plan. Overwhelm the input and leave no room for the unwelcome. Denial is food for it. Inattention is the best response. Don’t flinch. Don’t look. Hug the ground and abhor the deep and unsoft dome of sky. Avoid distance. Stick to chamber music, made in small rooms, without speaking.
Well, time to read The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz. It’s already terribly frightening. Still, everyone should buy it, I need this sort of book to exist
Airports used to be a 1. I don’t know how it happened but now airports are a 3. This doesn’t make sense. Drugs are generally at a therapeutic peak at the airport, this is on purpose, and should keep fluttering butterflies off the wheel and see them safe behind the glass walls of a benzodiazepine bell jar. No more. Now airports are full of people who are even less real than what is generally referred to by that term. It’s profoundly upsetting, being surrounded by ghost-like philosophical zombies. Even seeing them physically hurts. It’s nearly as bad as dollar stores.
If everything happens at once temporally, so that they may both be there and not, but the 3, being discreet creates a touchstone, it’s ridiculous to expect me to cope with this in a way that could be decreased normative. I can’t change the order in which things happen. I can’t tell what’s about to happen, that’s been dead for years, a personal failure. I can try and push and prod all to maybe move the needle just a little, enough to get to the other side of security. And security, inscrutable. Signs describing requirements are smudged hieroglyphs. Standards from a federal agency are inconsistent whims. There’s no way to adapt, no way prepare for alligator wrestling, not when it’s a different alligator every time. I hate it there. They broke it.
Something has changed the utilitarian, earnestly navigable airport as a 1 into the worst sort of 3. With enough β-blockers it shouldn’t be possible to get constant high heart rate alerts. It’s a good thing though in theory, proof of life, at least. I think this is all related to a personal problem. Without being able to put a date to it, though it’s been months now, sketchbooks and watercolor blocks and pallets and pens have been abandoning me. That’s maybe inside, it’s my faltering regime of maintenance that’s the root of the problem. That might be good to write about later-for now tides.
Build upon a beach, or among the dunes, and in time be overtaken. Have you ever been to Kittyhawk? There’s a mini gulf there swallowed by dunes. It’s more meaningful than any corps of engineers flooded village. What to do about disappearing cotton paper and fake sable brushes, pages of effort suddenly gone forever? Cheap. Become cheap. Throw out the pretense and use the worst paper. Use a gel rollerball. I can’t pretend to have it figured out yet, they just seem far more forgiving when I suffer a lapse.
Yeah, of course I know, this is just filler, prologue. The next one will be at least a little practical, I promise. For now a poor attempt at presenting things in narrative form. It was described to me once what it was like to take a day off from school in the middle of the week. Car on the road and things on the sidewalks were all surprising. It’s a dissonance. Should be on school, so seeing the everything that still exists is strange. It’s how shallow graves and tarp-wrapped corpses are found; the depositor takes for granted that the out of the way corner of the field, the scrubby tree line, is remote. The solopists oversight.
I don’t know why, but I can speculate that it had to do geofencing of purchasers, but the Etchr Nano was available from other retailers before they sold it on their own site. Now you can buy it directly, and you should! I think it’s more profitable for them. And I really like them being in business.
I think that Elizabeth Holmes is not real. It’s hard to tell at a distance. There’s enough evidence, an affected voice, style, and habits are only part of it. The greater part is the cliché childhood narrative, more than that however, is the long hours. From everything I’ve read there was never a functional product, no real founder-driven development cycle, and nothing, concrete that may have required long hours. Re-papering a tiger may take time, lots of time even, only none on the part of the founder from what I can tell.
I think the only reason the names Theranos and WeWork are mentioned in the same sentence is simply that each is an example of the enthusiastic parting the gullible wealthy from both their reason (however feeble) and their cash. On the outside, investors decided wealth made up for a lack of knowledge. Plenty of folks on the inside knew it wasn’t going to work, eventually, they acted. I’m not clear after one book that Elizabeth actually understood that her requirements; must be countertop, must work with a drop, must test everything, was the cause of failure. All the fraud, outright lies, toxicity, stemmed from that. She wanted to build a desktop computer without building ENIAC first. Simple.
I can’t get past the long hours though. If your not part of development, if your not a chemist, an engineer, a developer, an inventor or wrench turner, and by all accounts no kind of project manager, what do you get out of fourteen hour days except a chance to do coke at work and posture in front of the real workers? I think it was the chance to play the role, to be in a place, surrounded by things, that provided the sensation of being the founder of a unicorn. It wasn’t about going home and living in privilege, it was about staying at work and cultivating that glow of being the smartest, most successful person in the room.
It’s note worthy she got jail time. Over promising and under delivering is fine. Outright fraud and compliance failures are not. Still, I believe the crime for which she was sentenced was nothing more than making the wealthy look foolish. At the end of the day the naked emperor is still emperor, it’s the crowd of functionaries and advisors that won’t have a job tomorrow.
One of the key indicators that someone isn’t real is uniformity of behavior with nonconspecifics. When a rubber ball bounces and a feather does too, that’s not a real feather. The easy way to identify people who aren’t real is the visceral reaction they elicit. Identifying people who aren’t real at a distance doesn’t allow for that immediate, infallible test. Perception of the world at some level is a requirement for operation in it. There’s a scale where function within a standard deviation is not attractive of external intervention. It’s only necessary to remain within standard range when interacting with people who are real, people who aren’t real can be discounted. Let’s back up.
I had a client who was based out of a coworking space in NYC. They wanted an in person meeting. I didn’t. Travel and accommodation reimbursement was proffered on top of existing remuneration. So I took an Amtrak in. I couldn’t take a flight because something has currently broken airports and I haven’t come up with a way to address that yet. That’s how I spent a day in a WeWork. As a result I had to read about WeWork. No one within that narrative demonstrated behavior of a real person.
Definitely not just a guy who sublet office space.
Blanket observations follow. The business, the “invention” of the founder was not in any way novel. Success was a product of the same things which always yield success, contacts, charm, and confidence, paired with conceit on the part of the investor(s). It was funny that for all the talk of alcohol and pot, there was no mention of the abuse of stimulants. The omission was so glaring that it’s hard to chalk it up to anything other than a tacit agreement between the author and someone’s lawyers. At least plenty of office furniture sellers made a few bucks though.
Business modles are important but comfortable chairs are importanter.
As a story the whole saga was interesting enough, even if all the characters were exclusively the most eye roll inducing producers of odorless shit. My favorite examples are Adam hiring respected surfers specifically to shield himself from the mocking disdain of people who actually paddle out and wait for a good wave while being towed out via jet ski all to ride as many waves as possible without being fatigued and Rebekah doing exactly what every delusional un-schooling single mother would if provided an inexhaustible budget.
I think the most interesting part was my learning how the founders of an objectively failed start-up, profit, and how much of a gonzo parody it is of someone trying to open a café. If I wanted to open a coffee shop I’d head to a bank (after my lobotomy of course) and pitch for a loan. Money in hand, I open for business and try to net enough profit to both operate, live, and cover my loan payments. If I want to “disrupt caffeine delivery and toast” I convince the friend of a friend’s hedge fund manager that I have a billion dollar idea. They publicly agree, and give me a hundred million dollars. I pocket some cash and some stock right away, and then sell more stock based on their public assessment that I’m a genius. Then, before anyone admits they’ve made a terrible mistake I sell as much of my personal stock as I can manage. The cycle repeats several times with the plan that eventually stock will be sold to the public. This will either prove out the hedge fund valuation, or let the little with retirements managed by a hedge fund down.
Apparently there’s a story about some blood testing company that’s tangentially related, only some of them went to jail. Now I have to read that, which sucks. I want to read about animals.
Look, I want there to be a conspiracy to put chemicals in the water to make the freaking frogs gay, at least as much as the next person. Probably more. It would be amazing, mostly because thinking deeply about what could possibly motivate such a thing would surely quiet the voices. The fact the fertilizer Atrazine is a teratogen in amphibians and may cause hormonal changes in as much as 10 percent of male leopard frog tadpoles which turns them into hermaphrodites. It’s a great illustration of ignorance that something affecting gender presentation is “making the frogs gay” because sometimes knowledge isn’t even as deep as a puddle. I remember thousands of tadpoles boiling desperately in rapidly evaporating puddles. Tragically, we are continuing to learn that puddles aren’t nearly as deep as they were thought to be.
Over the course of a life an individual may accumulate things which are best described as “oh no.” Common examples of this may be a weapon found in a storm drain or fished up by a magnet tossed off the side of a bridge. A matched set of phalanges or a jaw bone pulled off a skeletonized corpse and secreted away before notifying the authorities would fall in the same category. It’s hard to blame anyone for collecting something like that, the opportunity may never come again. This needn’t be something found though, it could be something produced. Disclosures in a diary that should never have become a physical thing apply. That’s just the easy stuff. The careless artifacts things that may derail an otherwise pedestrian life. Of greater, but general rather than acute hazard are intrinsically dangerous products.
It’s possible through intentional or incidental action to end up with something genuinely dangerous. Pharmaceuticals are an easy, familiar, example. Go to the doctor. Get a prescription. Have a pharmacy fill it. Have a bad reaction or find it ineffective. New prescription. Old leftovers. Now here’s this chemical that most people shouldn’t be exposed to. It’s hazardous to the point that no less than two licensed professionals have to collaborate in order for someone to even purchase it. Someone who is explicitly not a knowledgeable professional must now dispose of it. Trash it, flush it, pitch it down the garbage disposal. Take it to an organized pill-drop where the claim is it will be “safely” incinerated. All of that puts it in the environment. Even medication that is consumed ends up in the environment, or at least the metabolic products of it do. This is the end condition of everything that isn’t ejected into extra-orbital space.
Everything ends up in the environment. From there it ends up in everything else. One way of dating old things is to test them for strontium-90. Ever since nuclear weapons were tested, strontium-90 is present in the environment. Bottle of wine from the 1800’s? If it contains strontium-90 it’s fake. Oddly enough that’s a rather harmless thing, there’s plenty of other stuff that’s been dispersed on a much larger scale. Lead is a perfect example and it’s accessible enough to be a reasonable example. Lead in gasoline is a thing of the past. Lead in the environment is forever. Lead in paint is found not just in buildings but in glazed pottery, cheap jewelry, and toys. Lead is disturbingly common in plumbing, if not water pipes themselves, then the solder holding the same together. The body treats lead like calcium, and purges itself of lead with about as much ease as it does calcium, which is, none at all. Microplastic is the lead of the new millennium. Above, I wrote about the individual responsibility of a person as a source of pharmaceuticals in water. As with greenhouse gasses, individuals are a source, but manufacturing is the main contributor to such an extent that it’s not even worth mentioning an individuals contribution except as an example more familiar to most than a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility.
And it continues from there. Agricultural run off causes harmful algal blooms when it’s not directly poisoning the watershed. Human waste puts viruses in the water at high enough levels that COVID is monitored at a municipal level by testing at wastewater treatment plants. Don’t worry about a conspiracy to poison the water, worry about the carelessness and corruption that’s triggering boil water advisories and enabling videos of people igniting their tap water. Amoeba, eating brains or only causing a week of dysentery. Parasites, coliforms, mercury, chemicals, purification byproducts, and this is all in the first world where tap water is “safe”. Don’t concern yourself with what’s being put in the water. Understand that what we know is in there is one thing. What we need to be afraid of is what we don’t know is in there, what we don’t know about what is in there, and what will be in there tomorrow because of what we’re putting in there today.
I stopped drinking water straight from the tap forever ago. I bought bottled water when it was popular. I read the municipal water quality report. I never had a boil water advisory, but I boiled. I got the best reverse osmosis activated carbon filter I could find. I bought the weird empty-tasting distilled water jugs in the laundry aisle. I got a bottle that runs on batteries and blasts anything that may be alive in there with sterilizing ultraviolet light. I became concerned about all the dead bodies I’ve been drinking. So I bought a strange water-purifying bottle with the vaguely religious name of Grayl. It’s replaceable filters mechanically remove particulates, including microplastics, sediment, and silt (which is oddly apparently not a sediment I guess). It’s activated carbon removes chemicals like PFAS, chlorine, and chloroform. Through some electroadsorption process it filters out heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and chromium.
Their ad copy includes a lot more contaminants, more living things, more of everything being removed. That’s important to me, removal. I don’t want to drink dead bodies. What happens if I accidentally think about them and then they suddenly aren’t inert corpses anymore?! What then!? No answer for that is there! I have absolutely no reason to believe there is anything in my water present to be removed. It’s probably a bad sign that I feel like I must remove something that is almost certainly no there.
The Grayl Ultrapress (and the larger Geopress which is the same but too large for a cup holder) has three basic parts. There’s the outer cup. This is the dirty side and is filled to the mark with source water. There is also the inner bottle, the inside of which is the clean side. Drinking access to clean water is available at the top of the inner bottle. The bottom of the inner bottle is open, and a replaceable filter threads in there. It is well gasketed, and it’s wise that the gaskets are part of the filter so that they are replaced when the filter is and therefore don’t wear out.
When the empty inner bottle is pressed into the filled outer bottle water is forced up through the filter. This is a lovely design. Unlike many filters, one is not obliged to suck on a straw, an objectively unpleasant way to drink. There’s also no extra bits, no hoses or pumps. The two bottles, they are the pump. Grayl offers a titanium version, and that’s odd as it expects you to boil water in the dirty outer bottle. From everything I’ve see their customer is expected to be the camper, the wilderness backpacker. I think they may be missing an important class of customer. They should market to the harmlessly paranoid, we’re sure to use more filters.
If it wasn’t for inconsistent sleep, I wouldn’t sleep. Sure, it’s possible to impose some order by always getting out of bed (when applicable) at the same time and always getting into bed at the same time. Any alarm can help with that. When it comes to actually logging periods of sleep and wakefulness or just restlessness a notepad cannot really cut it. That’s where smart devices are good. There’s a real value in knowing anything that happend between 11 PM and 5 AM didn’t actually; it was just some dream.
There are other pretty amazing things a smart watch can do. I don’t know enough about them to say if this is something all of them can do, but I do know the T-REX Ultra from Amazfit by Zepp has a number of features that are helpful in my particular circumstances. It’s also worth mentioning, before going into any greater depth, that the T-REX Ultra doesn’t fuel paranoid thoughts in the way an Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch does. The T-REX Ultra has WiFi, and Bluetooth, and GPS, but it doesn’t have a SIM card. And even then the WiFi doesn’t connect to do anything other than utility functions like software updates and downloading offline maps for the GPS. Unless the Android or iOS device the watch is paired to is nearby, it’s offline. It’s also a walled garden, even more than iOS, and far more than anything running Android, even watered-down. Which means, there’s probably no apps worth installing. In turn, that means that unless Zepp wanted to for some reason, no one’s tracking anyone. Except me, tracking myself, which is kind of the whole point. This applies to some other brands of smart watch as well, I just find it desirable as a feature.
You know how it can be hard to tell a fantasy from reality? One easy way to do it is detecting periods of sleep versus wakefulness. What if I wake up and the place is a mess, burglars? Hardly. The T-REX Ultra logged that I was awake most of last night. Fine, I did it. Quite reassuring really. It gets better though. There’s a feature called work out detection. To use that, it’s required that the specific type of workout be set. With GPS enabled, it logs position when it detects that you’re working out. Nice, what good is that? Panic, it’s good for panic.
I don’t know if this is a behavior others share. It’s nothing I bring up, and I avoid thinking about it as much as is possible for something that’s more than occasional. There’s a fear, real fear, the sort which is generally not felt. The hot side of that sense of impending doom anyone transfused with the wrong blood type gets before dying. Fear all the beta blockers and benzodiazepines in the world can’t touch. I run away from it, literally. A word of advice, always keep your shoes on. Tetanus is one thing, just keep your jab current. Glass and nails and who knows what are unpleasant enough. Frostbite, now that’s an unsoft thing!
If I wear the Amazfit T-REX Ultra, and I set it up to detect workouts, and I tell it that workout will be a run, it’ll pick up a GPS signal when I inevitably end up outside running away from something literally that is a danger only figuratively. Can’t a phone do that? Probably, but not my phone, and I’m too unreliable to always have it on my person anyway. How about one of the many child and elder tracking devices? Sure, if I needed to have someone else find me. I need to find me, and more importantly my way back to the start of the labyrinth, without any help from Ariadne and her thread.
Really though, is a big fancy smart watch the answer? It’s the best answer I got right now. And the Amazfit T-REX Ultra is a great choice. It’s comfortable, and rugged enough to leave on all the time, regardless of what you’re doing. Even better, the battery life is great. Two or three weeks is the usual, which is wonderful as I can travel without packing the charging cable, which is a USB-A to proprietary magnetic connector. I don’t know how anyone gets by charging a watch (or a phone) every day. Like I wrote above, it’s on the chunk side of big, that’s good though. I’ve had a Casio G-Shock on every day going back to the turn of the century, they were (probably still are) great for discrete alarms throughout the day. Staying medicated is hard without reminders.
Another few words about alarms. The T-REX Ultra has both an audible and vibration alarm. So unlike the Cheetah, you can choose to have it just beep, just vibrate, or both. It’s lovely that there’s the option. Finally, and this is probably true of all smart watches, setting multiple alarms is so easy. There’s no press and hold to enter alarm mode, hit this to change digit, hit that to go up, and that to go down, make sure the alarm is set to repeat, like you have with a regular watch. Touchscreen alarm setting is absolutely fantastic. I think it maybe doesn’t get any recognition because people went from watches to phones to smart watches, instead of watches to smart watches.
Compared to other devices I’ve used, it’s top of the pile. It’s also the most expensive, when new at least. See, the T-REX Ulta occupies a segment of the smart watch market where the comparable devices from other brands cost a few hundred, or even a thousand dollars more when new. As a result, there’s plenty of people who drop four hundred dollars on it to give it a try only to move on to a Garmin Fenix X7 or an Apple Watch Ultra. This means there’s a nice discount in the secondary market if you’re willing to look around a bit.
I don’t know what it is about them, the e+m pencils just all look good. New ones appear to be available rather frequently. They even have a 0.7mm model. At this point I wasn’t surprised to find that it uses a (seemingly unbranded) Schmidt mechanism. This of course means that the advance is accomplished with a ratcheting twist of the knurled metal finial. Likewise, it means you can get it in 0.5mm if you choose to replace it.
Draw all bats fast as you might
I hate the shape of the body. I mean it looks great, I simply cannot hold it in my usual grip. If you have a grip where your thumb actually touches the pencil, it’ll probably work for you. All the tripod and probably most of the related positions should be comfortable. If you grip with your fingers and the thenar eminence, good luck. It’s not possible to hold it comfortably that way. That’s good if you’re keen to abandon your unorthodox grip, bad if you’re married to it the way I am.
The weight and balance of the thing is pleasant. As is the case with the shape of the body forcing you into a “good” grip the short length and weight at the top will encourage holding it close to the point. No, there will be no dinner fork grip here. I think maybe this is the sort of pencil writer would like, this thought could be down to my feelings on holding it. The lack of any eraser may turn some off. I think no one uses the erasers in mechanical pencils anyway, I don’t.
You should draw. No, talent is not required. Whenever someone decides to tell me that they wish they could draw, I tell them that they can. If they keep talking, I recommend they search the web for “Tracey Emin monoprints”. That’s not to start a conversation about modern artists, it’s to get a reaction. That reaction is always more convincing than I could ever be. Anyone can draw. Most of the barrier to drawing is just doing it. The entry fee for that is wanting to do it. Success is when you want to do it, and have what you need to do it. Think back. Remember the quiet boring parts of grade school. Everyone spent hours a day around paper with a pencil or pen. Everyone drew. It could have been anything. People drew because they had time, and they had the bare minimum materials at hand. Some people may have even wanted to.
Just a couple more things I’m completely sure I read someplace else. Was it from Steven B. Reddy? I feel like it was from Steven B. Reddy. Excess time enables drawing without the need for desire as long as the tools are at hand. Excess desire makes up for not having the time, again, as long as the tools are at hand. The thing to remember is having what is needed to draw is what’s most important. That applies to all kinds of creative activities; it’s awful hard to sew without thread. There’s a popular sentiment in most activities that fancy tools aren’t needed to do good work. That’s true, they aren’t. The fact that some people aggressively go out of their way to prove it in a sort of desperate and intense way is telling. They probably have a favorite pencil brand. They know the weight of their paper, how much cotton is it. At some point, they’ve owned a pen that cost over one hundred USD.
Those people are not spouting hypocrisy. They’re trying to be encouraging, they’re just leaving out something important. Henry Rollins does some spoken word performances. In one of them he talked about this German handheld manual can opener. It’s designed so that you want to hold it; need to use it. A quality pen, the right paper, it makes a difference. They can be the sort of things that foster a desire to use them. All of that is meant to explain the way particular objects can be key to the construction of a habit. This extends beyond the obvious quality sketchbook and pleasing pencil, it’s my feeling that bags are the next logical thing.
In the same way it’s possible to draw with a burnt twig, it’s possible to carry what you need to have to draw in something that’s already being carried. A sketchbook and a pencil can fit into most purses, into whatever you carry your laptop in, into a jacket pocket, whatever. Here’s the thing though, a dedicated bag feels different inside your head. People talk about this or that smell bringing back a food of memory; that one special song that cracks the door separating the senile demented from the rest of the world. You can build that same frame around a bag. The Etchr Nano Satchel is perfect for that. Stop reading now and buy one.
I hope you’re back, even if this reads like a life story prefacing a recipe for rice and beans. Know, the mind is an overgrown field. The waist high grass is green and strong in the soft way a stone is. Certain thoughts, particular actions, traverse the overgrowth leaving stalks pushed aside as by a deer’s passing. The more the same path is tread, the easier it is to follow later. If at first it’s hard to discern, in time it’s easy to see. After a while, you can follow it blind; the stalks only just making contacts on either side. There’s nothing ahead needing to be trampled down. Draw today, and tomorrow and tomorrow, and all the days to come. Cut your path.
This could be done with something you already have. That’s harder. Something you already have has it’s own lines in the field, however faint or hard packed the soil. So start with something new, like the Etchr Nano Satchel. It’s purpose built, which lends it to a specific use, making it easier to begin the right path across the field. And it’s small, presenting no awkward bulk to contend with. Slim, resistant to carrying other than what’s intended. It’s great except that it looks very much like something worth stealing, so it’s a big plus if people are scared of you.
Not pictured, camera, tablet, sketchbooks, pencil, lead refill, USB brick, USB cable, pigtail AC cord.
The strap is wide and sturdy. It has all metal hardware which is nice for comfort because it can be less substantial without sacrifices to size like plastic would have. Click it on to any two of the 4 corner D-rings, which are plastic. Opposite corners are comfortable both in bag mode and in desk mode. The big outer pocket is more accommodating than it looks. Not just because it’s sewn with a sidewall fold, the oversized velcro pads help too. It can close pretty securely thanks to them, and it’s loud if someone tries to open it, for added security. Everything that isn’t actually for drawing fits in there.
Double zippers open it up to the fuzzy interior. I’m sure there was a reason to make that the material, I don’t understand the choice. There is a velcro tab on a strap that will hold the sides together, I don’t find it necessary. One side, the side that will be facing the floor in desk mode, has a series of elastic loops. They are different sizes. I put a pencil in one because the one I’m using now is too wide to fit easily in the pen loop on the working side. The working side has two elastic bands that can hold a sketchbook in place. I don’t use them. I think if I was using watercolors now I would use them. There’s also a thin pocket, it’ll fit an A5 sketchbook, as long as it isn’t too thick, though it is a tight fit.
Is it really useful? Is it something worth carrying when it really is purpose built for one thing? Yes, I think it is. When you’re on the road with the clothes on your back you really can get by with just this, if you’re used to that sort of thing already at least. For the homebody, the car-owner, someone who drives places instead of riding on busses or trains it may not be. I don’t know. I’m not that person. There’s a lot of places out there people will not let you sit. This allows you to get by standing, without your arms doing that weird shaky thing after holding a sketchbook for an hour.
Uncredited Work 