Ins/Outs #18

Christmas is here, 2026 and New Years is on our doorstep #dafurq. I literally wrote about there being no excuse for not feeling festive in the last newsletter and I just didn’t feel festive at all after that was posted. Anyways Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers!

Gucci Mane

Recently I’ve been exploring the music of Gucci Mane. Once you do a bit of listening you realise how influential he is, his style is baked into the fabric of so many other rappers' artistry. It’s so satisfying to me to discover this sort of stuff, where you can trace the influence of someone’s art throughout the years. He’s fun and he has an impressive legacy. 

Also he randomly has a self help book which I seriously considered asking for for Christmas for like a week.

Dressing like a little boy #dykenite

Get your carabiners out!!!! 

Chemosignals

When you are stressed, disgusted, scared and horny your body produces chemosensory signals. They’re largely referred to as pheromones but scientists are iffy about this term. I read a paper about how chemosignals function as a subconscious communication mechanism with the people around you that is not even analysed on a conscious level, think of how you can “smell” fear. Also that new baby smell is a real thing and is key in mother-baby bonding.

Taxi men serenading me

Taxi drivers are an underrated part of the social fabric of any city and surprisingly a lot of them write poetry. And some of them sing me songs with my name in them at 8:40am in the morning when I barely feel like a 3D being and ask me to rate their singing.

To be honest, if I could avoid late nights I think I would enjoy the constant varied social interaction of taxi service, they know everyone and everything and love a gossip. 

This Anthony Bourdain quote that I only realised was his quote 2 days ago. I thought the Buddha said it…

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Being well read

The way online literary buffs/Substack girlies posit being well read as an aspirational triumph is so aggravating to me. There’s so much content (on my algorithms anyways) that list reams and reams of books, websites, magazines but at the end of the day it is consumption for consumption's sake.

From reading memoirs of artists and musicians you gather that a lot of the time they had 3 or 4 inspirations maximum, with a lot of time and daring. They were experimenting with friends and getting involved in a scene, interacting with art that moved them to make their own. They were not engaging in some endless virtual competition to learn absolutely every cultural reference.

The content online that pushes this as a way to stop scrolling fails to realise that these kinds of lists are also overconsumption in themselves.

Snapchat

Ded fucking app that is also the last living memory of my childhood/tween/teen years. Like if I need to write a memoir I will return to my snapchat memories folder where my early adulthood will have fossilised and been permanently preserved like a bog body with a flower crown filter. 

A bleach and  tone

Like a bleach and tone, like a bleach and TONEE, eugh wh-whadayoumean a bleach and tone question mark?????

I have recently embarked on a journey towards becoming a platinum blonde and right now my hair is PEACH, it was giving 14 year old twitch streamer for a few days. I will not be this colour for long, it WILL be platinum….eventually…

The regular moon

A few weeks ago me and Cathal gathered at his table to discuss having a big kitchen and its fundamental role in quality of life, amongst our other plots and schemes. As I was walking home I looked up at the sky and there was a perfect halo around the moon, just at the junction of highfield west and magazine road there is a bare plot of sky that no houses or trees obstruct. The halo was speaking to me from this gap and it was FAB, geometrically perfect. 

Forget fibonacci’s sequence, circles are so perfect like in nature they are perfectly formed and something I really appreciate. I've been meaning to look into all the mathematics that underpins nature because sometimes you can get caught thinking we invented all this stuff (geometry, trigonometry etc.) when you’re learning formulas or theorems but really we are catching up to the base code of our universe, we are simply trying to qualify and quantify what has always been there. 

User Interface automation => User experience degradation

AI is being used to automate a lot of processes in apps (Spotify I’m looking at you) and the user experience is so shit now. There was a sweet spot there with Instagram in 2022 when they were making updates to the app that enhanced the ease of use and actually made sense, while still paying real humans to run it. Now, especially Spotify, and kind of Pinterest/Instagram as well, have made the switch to AI and the apps are stiff and glitchy, giving the impression of amateurish work in an age of such advanced technology.

It used to feel like the app (any social media app) was made perfectly for you and now it feels like pre-2018 social media where you had to be careful of certain in-app actions or pitfalls e.g remember only having one line of text per snap on snapchat, and how it took them ages to allow you type more - the platform was not keeping pace with evolving user needs fast enough. 

Also, hello (!!) Instagram putting the reels in the middle of the screen like you lot KNOW what you’re doing. I hate this AI induced era of hostile social media, like TikTok is a threat to your mental health, cognitive development, physical health too but now Instagram has joined the bandwagon of rather shamelessly trying to get you uber-addicted to scrolling, now instead of smoking black tar heroin they are trying to turn you onto intravenous injection. Maybe that’s dramatic but the reels being moved really irritated me, my biggest opp is now my Insta???