Hi. I’m Matt; a reader, writer, product manager, self-taught programmer and researcher with a broad interest in complex systems, computing and communication. There’s more about me and my activities on my hub site.
This is Swell and Cut, a blog of questions and answers. And you’re now a witness to its third era. Third era posts are posted first on SCTE Substack, and then syndicated here.
The first era began on August 27th 2015 with the post, Do the work. Let others take the credit. It ended on 13th January 2019 with AFK, kinda. It involved three-plus years of daily blogging, two posts on Ribbonfarm, some interviews, and the hawking of my prose elsewhere. Ultimately, it led to the self-publishing of Disconnected, a curated collection of first era blog posts.
Swell and Cut’s second era spanned 2019 to late 2023. It featured an intermittent publishing cadence and a surface dormancy that concealed deeper currents. These deeper currents involved three self-published works of fiction—Barker, Ss, Riven—alongside annual reviews-slash-roundups—Status of the Wholes—and a pivot into product management and startup life.
The third era of Swell and Cut is not about daily publishing nor dormancy and intermittence. It concerns what I’ve called “emergent miscellanea”. Things that are not really related to:
- My research into motion-based approaches to computing and intelligence
- My work in product or as a consultant/advisor etc.
- My reading marginalia or artefact consumption
- My fiction writing
However, because I am the common factor for Swell and Cut and the activities above, the emergent miscellanea featured here are adjacent (and at least minimally entangled) with some or all of the above. Some ways to characterise the atomic units of Swell and Cut’s third era?
- As conceptual exhaust, “waste” downstream of engine operation
- As intellectual offcuts, strange pieces of fabric too misshapen for use in production
- As winded seeds, units of thought benevolently distributed
- As psycho-activators, supplements that accelerate my thoughts, ideas and energy
- As sketches with inappropriate fidelity, being too fuzzy or too sharp to fit elsewhere
And the name itself? “Swell and Cut?” I think of it as memetic shorthand—a compression of sorts—for a drafting process mentioned in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. Tengo, a writer and one of the trilogy’s central characters, adds and subtracts from a manuscript, over and over, until the substance and style matches his expectations.
A deliberate alternation between humaneness and divinity; a duel of disruption and harmonisation; a process as apt for our existence as it is for the writing craft. Thus, I thought it a fitting name for the web-place where I ask questions and assail answers.
Here’s the full excerpt for the interested:
“Once he had filled out this first block of text, Tengo’s next task was to eliminate from his bloated manuscript everything that was not strictly necessary, to remove every extra bit of fat. Subtraction was a far simpler process than addition, and it reduced the volume of his text by some thirty percent. It was a kind of mind game. He would set a certain time period for expanding the text as much as possible, then set a certain time period for reducing the text as much as possible. As he alternated tenaciously between the two processes, the swings between them gradually shrank in size, until the volume of text naturally settled down where it belonged, arriving at a point where it could neither be expanded nor reduced. He excised any hint of ego, shook off all extraneous embellishments, and sent all transparent signs of imposed logic into the back room. Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game.”
Swell & Cut 