Swell & Cut

The “Status of the Wholes” is my annual review-slash-roundup. It’s both a personal reflection and a summary of salient activities, projects and milestones from the given year. Previous editions cover 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023; this one concerns 2024.

This’ll likely be the last annual review in this form because the structure has drifted away from what I want and need an annual review to do. What those wants and needs explicitly are is something that I’ll muddle through as the timeline drags us all towards 2026. Until then, here’s the contents of this year’s Status of the Wholes.

Intro: Via Negative
Breathe
Read (Stats, Ratings, Tracks, On peri-reading recall)
Write
Move
Play
Speak
Outro: Via Positiva
Appendix: On The “Status of the Wholes”

Intro: Via Negative

My 2024, at a glance:

Jan – March: working out my notice at a B2B software marketplace startup
Apr – Oct: building Subset
Nov: travelling around Australia
Dec: initial Subset release on iOS TestFlight and more building / prep

I left a somewhat conventional job with supporting structures like a team, a routine and a direction, built a product that over-indexed on complex, pattern-based saving, sharing and search, pivoted it towards simple and direct user behaviours, took a month off from it all to travel Australia’s south west and east coasts with my wife, and picked back up with an iOS TestFlight app release to close.

Throughout it all, many things either melted away or were actively removed. It was a year of subtraction, of simplicity, of searches for the essential.

It was a good year with successful searches.

Let’s get into it.

Breathe

Last year I wrote:

“Breathe” became a significant whole for me following a sustained entanglement with contemplative traditions and practices several years ago. Its focus is explicitly the breath, without any especial regard for any specific protocol, school, discipline, ideology or culture. This is because, as Bhante Gunaratana notes in Mindfulness in Plain English, the breath is always there, ever present as a refuge and available as a foundation to return to. Unfortunately, I have not done much returning.

2024 wasn’t much different; there were minimal “back to the breath” moments or practices.

Thus: no discernible activity equals no notes (alas).

So, moving on…

Read

2024 wasn’t my hottest year for reading. There were patchy periods where I struggled to remain consistent but overall I managed to keep the practice up.

Stats

A high level overview of the year, book-wise:

87 started; 79 read; 8 quit
40 ebooks; 37 paperbacks; 10 hardcover
56 non-fiction; 31 fiction
65+ unique authors; ~45 male; ~20 female; ~10 multi-authored
~8 major genres; ~15 major topics (according to Claude Sonnet)
Longest read time: 76 days (The Bonehunters, Malazan VI)
Shortest read time: <1 day (Ways of Seeing, Talking to Humans)
Average read time: ~21 days

For a full list of the all the reads, check out my 2024 mega-thread on Farcaster.

Ratings

Each book I read gets a quantitative rating upon completion or put-down. There’s five categories and the increments are 0.5. The rating given is quite arbitrary; more vibe or impression than lengthy, involved and structured evaluation.

These are also vulnerable to the same biases as other ratings systems. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ve never rated a book less than a four on any criteria. Still, it is a reflection of how I feel about the text.

The rating is simple for fiction books—it mirrors how I decompose a story when I author fiction:

Character: the cast of beings
World: the world the cast inhabits
Events: what happens in the world, to the cast
Narration: how what happens in the world, to the cast, is described
Authorial intent: purity and potency of the author’s purpose

Non-fiction poses a greater challenge. I settled on these five categories:

Authorial intent: purity and potency of the author’s purpose
Style: quality of the prose
Rhetoric: persuasiveness of logic, argument or narrative
Density: research, thought or experience communicated per page
Salience: a book’s individual rightness and its impact upon myself or society

This year, I’m omitting any Malazan Book of the Fallen reads from the top rated lists. It’s a series I’ve read multiple times before and always rate highly.

Now, let’s check out the top books per individual rating criteria.

Fiction; authorial intent: The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut (9.0)
Fiction; character: The Murderbot Diaries 1-6 by Martha Wells (9.0)
Fiction; world: Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch II) by Ann Leckie (9.0)
Fiction; events: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (8.5)
Fiction; narration: The Murderbot Diaries 1-6 by Martha Wells and When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (9.0)
Non-fiction; authorial intent: Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad and Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel (9.0)
Non-fiction; style: all 8.5…
- Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
- The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The Protocol Kit (pack #2) by the Summer of Protocols 2023 Cohort
- Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Laszlo F. Foldenyi
Non-fiction; rhetoric: all 8.5…
- Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Laszlo F. Foldenyi
- Boom by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
- The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch
- Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Global Ed.) by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
- Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer
- Matter and Motion by Thomas Nail
- Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad
- Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
Non-fiction; density: all 9.5…
- Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I: The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Global Ed.) by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
- The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Non-fiction; salience: all 9.0…
- Boom by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
- Systems Medicine by Uri Alon
- The Protocol Kit (pack #2) by the Summer of Protocols 2023 Cohort
- Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise by Saras Sarasvathy
- Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

And the top rated overall?

For fiction:

Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch II) by Ann Leckie (41)
The Murderbot Diaries 1-6 by Martha Wells (40.5)
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (40.5)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (40.5)
From Hell by Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell (40)
System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries 7) by Martha Wells (38)
Once and Future Vol. Five: The Wasteland by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain (37.5)
Son of the Shadows (Sevenwaters Trilogy #2) by Juliet Marillier (37.5)
Ancillary Mercy (Imperial Radch #3) by Ann Leckie (37)
Morphotrophic by Greg Egan (36)

For non-fiction:

Civilisation and Capitalism 15th-18th Century Vol. 1: Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel (44)
Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad (42.5)
Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer (42.5)
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Ed., Global) by Stuart Russel, Peter Norvig (42.5)
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (42)
Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann (41.5)
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris (41.5)
Protocol Kit (Pack #2) by Summer of Protocols 2023 Cohort (41.5)
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (41)
The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut (41)

And some honourable mentions that stood out as I looked back over the year’s reads but weren’t in the top rated overall?

Boom by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
Border and Rule by Harsha Walia
Systems Medicine by Uri Alon
Lapidarium by Hettie Judah
Energy and Civilisation: A History by Vaclav Smil
The Unauthorised History of Australia by David Hunt
Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise by Saras Sarasvathy
The English Dane by Sarah Bakewell
The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Tracks

I read continuously and in parallel. I’m a moody reader and reading multiple texts simply increases the probability that there’s always something I’m excited to read at a particular moment. I accomplish this by having defined tracks that act as attentional braces, and it’s a stance that applies to both fiction and non-fiction.

The current tracks for non-fiction have been in play for the last two years, and will remain as guide rails for the coming year, too. They are as follows:

Motion: the study of motion as an abstract phenomena (flows, folds and fields) and as an applied concept (flows, folds and fields in different domains)
Computing: the study of computing across the entire range of the technological stack, from the boring edge to the bleeding edge and from established paradigms to alternative, adjacent possible, truncated ones
Intelligence: the study of how one (a person, an animal, an entity, a system, agents, sub-agents, or super-agents) situates themselves in the world, constructs realities, makes decisions and embodies actions

For fiction, I’m off of my sequential art focus and back to regular texts. There’ll still be an emphasis on female and minority authors, though with exceptions for some things I really want to read. And the split will remain the same as previous years, as it feels nicely balanced: one fantasy read, one sci-fi read, and one read that is a classic or a fresh work (genre agnostic).

On peri-reading recall

In September 2024, I worked through Barbara Oakley’s Learning How to Learn course. More recently, I’ve been sampling Math Academy’s approach to pedagogy. With respect to my reading practice, the thing that stood out is the criticality of recall, and the absence of recall in my reading practice. It matters less with fiction, but for non-fiction I suspect I’d be unable to read 10-20 pages and then adequately enumerate the outline of that which I’d just read.

This is kind of deliberate. For me, the obsessive capture of consumed information is overkill. I’ve tried a bunch of approaches in the past and all of them get in the way of the thing I want to do, which is read and have more thoughts. Plus, I suspect there’s more upside in blitz-reading and forgetting 99% versus slow-reading and rolling a rigorous process to capture highlights and notes. But I would like to buff my first-brain and be a touch more receptive to the grains of sand slipping through my metaphorical fingers as I read.

Right now, I mark up interesting passages (or highlight them digitally) and add marginalia as I go. I never revisit the passages and scrawls but it helps me read more actively. It’s like sitting at the front of the class, leaning forward and asking questions. The progression I’d like to make is to produce intermittent summaries (e.g. every ten pages) of what I’m reading. Perhaps in the text themselves. Perhaps in a notes app of some sort on my phone.

There’s zero intent to process them further or to push them to a system and utilise the output. I just want a forcing function for more attentive reading in the moment. So as well as ensuring I just log good reading time in in 2025, I’ll be experimenting with improving peri-reading recall.

Write

In comparison to other years, 2024 was a bit of a dud when it comes to writing.

There were only a handful of posts on Swell and Cut. There was last year’s Status of the Wholes, a couple templated learning retros on Git and meta-learning, a recap of my first Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition, and blogs about weak tying concepts, AI + usability, and the forces of capital, technology, labour and ecology. The latter trio were the final pieces of an experimental “third era” of Swell and Cut.

Between June and September, I did get out a bunch of blogs for Subset. These helped me work through some of the foundational assumptions at the core of the product, test some ideas with potential users, and flex my writing muscles a little. Some favourites:

I also continued with The Magnificent Seven (my weekly links newsletter) until late October 2024. It felt like the right time to close up the production of that specific artefact, both to prepare for a new way of link-propagating and to take a break from consistent output.

Less visible was the consistent, almost daily writing that was gobbled up by LLM chat interface interactions. Over the course of the year I sent 7,244 messages to a LLM (usually Claude Sonnet; thanks Raycast). Most of that was orientated towards the product, design and engineering work associated with Subset. Writing is a proxy for thought, and 0-to-1ing a product is a thought-intensive process that’s well suited to an infinitely patient asynchronous conversation partner.

Finally, I did an okay job of posting “today’s reading” logs on the Warpcast books channel, and posting training logs of Brazilian jiu-jitsu sessions in the grappling channel. These tailed off towards the end of the year, however.

Move

Movement for 2024 was, for the most part, on autopilot. An overview:

Bowman-style movement every day (e.g. floor sitting, standing working, movement snacks)
2-3 at-home sessions per week (Original Strength / Simple and Sinister style)
2-3 x Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes per week
2-3 x 30-45 minute rucks at 20kg per week
1 x indoor climbing session every 2 weeks (on average)
Some cycling in the summer, some swimming during Aussie spring

I didn’t push hard on any front. I didn’t set physical goals, try to maximise technical skills, or test myself psychologically. I just tried to remain consistent, enjoy the process, and sustain high basic energy and a sense of vitality. That mostly worked.

However, I did pick up some injuries.

Ribcage cartilage dislocation from a BJJ comp > disrupted training and sleep for 2 months
Minor knee twist / sprain during BJJ > targeted single leg work and precautionary measures
Minor lower back tweaks early and late in the year > some forced rest and light rehab
Recurring intense calf cramps to end the year > explicit load management re: rucking

Fortunately, none of the injuries really stopped me moving completely; they just prevented certain classes or forms of movement at particular times. And all of them heightened my awareness (or, in some cases, reminded me) of the importance of basic things like warm-ups, multi-planar movement capacity and strength, and deliberate de-loading / recovery phases.

Play

Looking back, 2024 feels a like relatively unplayful year. Which is strange.

The list of anti-play directives from last year’s Status of the Wholes doesn’t mirror myself, my actions or my decisions during the year. I did new things in new ways, met different people, tried new tools, experimented with new ideas, went to new places, did things with no obvious desirable outcome or explicit upside, and at times didn’t do much at all.

Yet the year of 2024 isn’t registering as playful. I’m not 100% sure why. At this point, I’m not too interested in finding out why, either. Because 2025, in contrast, will house some initiatives and areas of activity that are pure play. That’ll give 2025 a different flavour. Those things:

Heading towards recreational math (from Math Academy to pop-up projects)
Experimenting with emerging AI tech (e.g. Exo, agentic workflows, reasoning models)
Authoring fiction mobile-first (e.g. Drafts + version control + on-demand publishing)
Crafting kinocomputing dialogues (e.g. AI + textual livestreams + longform interviews)

These are queued up; the question is whether or not they’ll all come to fruition.

Speak

The “speak” section signals a commitment, ultimately, to engage with others. That may sound incredibly basic but I’ve always struggled with it. I very quickly forget that people matter to me and that being around others is good, actually. Without super-structures steering me towards sociality, I drift towards personal solitude and social isolation. Because of this, I’ve got better at counter-acting myself. 2024 was a nice demonstration of that fact.

Firstly, at the end of 2023, I decided to make 2024 a year of love.

Each day, take a card
Write the date
Write, “I love you”
Give it to a loved one

Naturally, the recipient of these cards was my wife. It’s metta on easy mode—I didn’t fancy doing cards for strangers, or for a mortal enemy.

Initially, I was purchasing cute postcards, writing, “I love you” on them, and giving them to her. Not long after I’d been at it, I realised that sustaining a constant stream of new cards was difficult (and expensive). I also discovered that “I love you” is kinda lame to receive over and over as a message.

The solution? Blank cards with a custom sketch or drawing on the front and a message on the back that says, “[name], I love you—especially [insert unique reason]”. This approach was both much more fun to produce and more pleasantly received.

I managed to keep up the love cards for the first 9-10 months of the year with only a few missed days. The practice dropped whilst we travelled Australia, and I didn’t re-establish the rhythm during December.

It was a gift to see someone I love smile and be a little surprised every day, and the practice taught me a lot about love as an experience and about the love I have for my wife. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Another thing I had in action during 2024 was what I dubbed a “stay in touch system”—SITS for short. It’s essentially a list of people sorted into groups with different cadences of contact (e.g. continual vs. every two months vs annually) that I would review at the start of each week.

I didn’t obey the dictates concerning frequency of contact, and I definitely didn’t do a good job of updating the list and incorporating new people into the structure. What I did accomplish, however, is many more arbitrary messages, conversations and experiences than I would have had in the absence of such a system. It helped me remember the people around me and nudge me towards saying “hi” and checking in.

Moving forward, I’ll probably just collapse the SITS to a flat list of people and review it weekly. I’ll probably also call out some communities in there to help me be active and present within them, and incorporate some basic directives for my activity on different channels (e.g. what I want to post on Bluesky, what I want to cast about on Farcaster).

Lastly, one of the more difficult “speak”-focused parts of 2024 was having to enter “talk mode” for Subset—to talk up the product to new users and maybe-interested parties with no prior context, and to undertake research and discovery work with potential users to validate assumptions and beliefs. I’m not a natural reservoir of charisma and I’ll take the written word over the spoken one on most days. Unfortunately, though, doing a new product and trying to transition it to a company is somewhat incompatible with “be quiet and toil in silence” as a default stance. Intermittently, I occupied talk mode. It didn’t go too badly. Not great, by any means, but not awful, either.

Outro: Via Positiva

On the “about” page of Swell and Cut, I describe the origin of the blog’s name:

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.

2024 was about subtraction, via negativa, cuts. 2025 is shaping up to be the inverse, via positiva, addition, swells. There are big questions I must answer in both the personal and the professional realms, and all the questions amount to:

“Consider x: what must be added, and why?”

2025 will be a year where basic, fundamental questions get answered.

Appendix: On The “Status of the Wholes”

As described at the head of this post, the “Status of the Wholes” is my annual review-slash-roundup. It consists of an introduction that tackles the broad theme or motif for the year, followed by a six-part survey of my activities and a brief outro. The origin story of this six-part structure is as follows:

26/03/16: I combined three ideas—the 80/20 rule, Parkinson’s Law and minimum effective dose—to create a daily standard for myself. Shorthand, it looks like: Br / Re / Wr / Mo / Pl. Breathe, read, write, move and play.

25/02/18: After learning about Josh Waitzkin’s method for compressing rituals (“making smaller circles”), I changed the daily standard into a scalable loop. The standard could be compressed, extended and performed multiple times, and different components could be emphasised or even omitted.

Sometime in 2019: a sixth element was added: “speak”. Its meaning was first relationship-focused—talking to my friends and family. But it also included attempts to pick up some rudimentary French.

These days, I no longer enforce the standard or utilise the scalable loop day-to-day. However, Br / Re / Wr / Mo / Pl / Sp is still used as an organising paradigm for how I think about myself and my actions, both on a day-to-day basis and over the longer term.

Another salient thing is the use of the word “wholes”. It is deliberate and important. A while back, Joe Norman penned an essay called Generating Wholes. He said:

In living systems the whole generates the parts. The parts do not exist a priori. In each step of this process we can see that both wholes and parts come from existing wholes. They are not constructed in the usual sense—they are not manufactured. They are synthesized via an unbroken chain of wholes, extending back to the beginning.

I see each of the six elements—breathe, read, write, move, play, speak—as a whole. “I contain multitudes”, as the saying goes, and these are some of the headliners.

I also see these elements as vehicles of practice. In When Things Fall Apart Pema Chodron describes samaya bonds. These are sacred vows, an unconditional commitment that a teacher and a student make to one another.

If the student accepts and trusts the teacher completely and the teacher accepts the student, they can enter into the unconditional relationship called samaya. The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be, and the student will also never leave the teacher, no matter what.

Breathing, reading, writing, moving, playing and speaking are teachers; I remain their student.