5. Super Pad
When I was five or six, I started a business. I would gather discarded paper from around the house — the unused backs of letters, old bills, empty margins of school notebooks — and cut them into smaller pieces. I’d bind them with thread or staples, sometimes with ribbon, and make covers from leftover chart paper or cardboard. Then I’d decorate them: hand-drawn borders, coloured titles, sometimes a badly-glued picture cut out from a magazine. I sold them to my parents (the only available market) for 10 paise each. It was a pure profit business. My only investment was time, glue, and excitement.
I called them Super Pads.
These little notebooks were too small to contain big ideas. They were for everyday things, trivial things, things that you wouldn't put elsewhere. Below are a few of my writings that never found place in more formal publications. I am happy to let them exist as they are.
2025
On Hallucinations
Are AI hallucinations more human than we think?
800 ≠ 200: The Panic and the Log Line
On the pressure of being wrong, the rhythms of system building, and the human cost of technical mistakes.
Digital Humanities Didn’t Begin with the Computer
Tracing computational imagination long before circuits: Propp, Oulipo, and the patterned structures of thought.
When the System Surprises You
Reflections on generative systems, predictability, and the unexpected emergence of form.
On Disclosure
Technology as relation, not instrument: archives as acts of public revelation and fragile democracy.
After the Music
What it means to rebuild context when digitisation strips away the materiality of sound and memory.
The Photograph Already Exists
Presence, repetition, and the drift into synthetic memory in the age of digital photography.