The View From Here

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, as seen above. I went down to Old Leigh the other day to hang around and buy some fish, and got stopped by some guy wanting to take a photo of me with his fancy new camera. I politely demurred, as I was on a mission to obtain seafood. Later on, I stopped in a pub to grab a coffee, and caught sight of myself in a mirror. I was breaking in new black Karrimor boots, and wearing old black Wranglers, a grey rollneck submariner sweater, a long grey scarf in a fake-knot hitch, a grey merino watchcap, and a long black leather coat with the brown leather shoulder bag my kid got me. And I hadn’t looked in a mirror with good light in a while. My winter beard, fully silver in that light, turns out to have grown to immense proportions. I looked like the ghost of the oldest U-Boat commander to have died at sea. No wonder he wanted a photo. He probably wasn’t sure if I was actually alive.

In this letter:

• The View From Here

• Rabbit R1 Redux

• Transitions

• The News

• Up and Down

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

THE VIEW FROM HERE

It’s been a while since I spent any real time on the coastline. I’ve lived around here almost my entire life. When I was nineteen, I lived some miles east of this particular spot, in a bedsit inside a house on the corner of what turned out to be the seafront red light district. Seaside sex workers used to be called “sand rats” - my grandad, when he thought I was out of earshot, would talk about some mate of his who’d gone off sandratting. I made friends with all of the women who worked there. One day I left the house to see none of them working, and one sole woman who looked like a lost schoolteacher standing there. There was a van parked awkwardly about ten yards down from her. Something seemed off, so I decided to sit on my front step, have a cigarette, see what happened and enjoy the view. Ten minutes later, a customer straight out of central casting shambled up and propositioned her. The back doors of the van flew open, four uniformed coppers leapt out, grabbed the guy and sucked him into the back of the van. The doors slammed shut and all was silent.

She glared at me from across the road and shooed me off because I couldn’t stop laughing.

I saw a meme the other day explaining that the problem with Generation is that we turned thirty at the age of ten and at the age of fifty we think we’re still thirty. It’s not wrong. I don’t think of myself as having forty years of history with the Thames Delta, and it’s only when I sit with the view and let my mind wander that I realise how many stories have piled up.

I watched one of the big ships creep down the estuary towards the refinery and remembered the first time I paid attention to the shipping.

I was up at a cliffside venue where my girlfriend of the time was performing, and had gone outside at intermission to look down on the water and the pier. Great view from up there. I’d had a few drinks, and assumed I was a bit pissed, because a big ship seemed to be right next to the pier. Now, Southend Pier is 1.3 miles long, but a big ship doesn’t have the draught to get that close most of the time. I walked around to get a better look, and figured I’d had one drink too many, because from my angle it now looked like the ship was inside the pier. And that couldn’t possibly be right, could it?

Wikipedia:

The view from here always somehow has the views from yesterday superimposed on it, if you’ve stayed in one place for long enough.

OPERATIONS

RABBIT R1 REDUX

Someone asked me to talk about the Rabbit R1, the handheld “AI” device I got last year.

Here’s the thing. It doesn’t do most of the things they say it does. Or, at least, I can’t make it do any of those things. The “teaching mode” thing where you show the system (on your home computer) how to operate a website for you just doesn’t work for me.

But, as an AI search device? Actually useful. And now there’s a function where you can tell it the kind of voice you want it to speak in. So now mine sounds like Jeremy Irons as a BBC news presenter. I don’t have a SIM card in it, so it’s tied to wifi in the house. It can pair to phone-as-hotspot, which is how I had to get the last OTA update, because it wouldn’t connect to my new wifi hub until it updated…

Is it worth two hundred American dollars? Until it acts like the AI agent it presents itself as, no. But it’s subscription free, and AI-augmented search is much superior to Google. Which fits in well for me with my continuing attempts to avoid my phone while also needing information. I can just sit the Rabbit on the lapboard next to my notebook and have degraded BBC clone Jeremy Irons tell me what I need to know. He’s currently reading me the top three headlines from the Financial Times.

It’s not the agentic Box that I wanted. But it’s an interesting experiment. And maybe they’ll fix some of it. It has certainly gotten better over the months since release. Just don’t expect it to work as advertised.

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ORBITAL

TRANSITIONS

This is art by Billy Graham and Klaus Janson from an issue of JUNGLE ACTION from Marvel in the 1970s, with script by Don McGregor. That is a hell of a transition for a Seventies superhero comic to pull off. Graham was the first black art director in American comics before moving over to Marvel to draw full-time for a few years. He shifted out of comics to become a playwright and an award-winning set designer.

Billy Graham was not fucking around in this sequence, and inker Janson - later to become famous as Frank Miller’s inker on DAREDEVIL and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS - puts his back into keeping up and making it work. Note also, especially given the limited tools a Marvel comics colourist had in 1974, Glynis Wein doing a fine job connecting it all up. The fade of the handshake binding the two figures in the third panel.

Now check this, complete with slabs of McGregor text and a Will Eisner-style “title logo as art” -

This is a version of what Salgood Sam (1) calls the “rolling transition” -

The gold standard for this sort of thing is probably still a lovely guy I once met called Patrice Killoffer:

It’s one of the transitions that are unique to comics. The Billy Graham one above is adapting the cinematic cross-fade transition for comics, which is a great idea. But the rolling transition can probably be sourced back to cave paintings, which more often than not were sequential art.

1. Salgood Sam on the rolling transition

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

This is a new piece for Orbital Operations by Lordess Foudre. More of her work can be found on lordess.io. You can also find her on Instagram.

OTHER

UP AND DOWN

Office goals.

Please enjoy the most bullshit picture of a flying car you ever saw:

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

morning computer moons rocks oceans

Printing For Notebooks

morning computer materials

Bunuel’s Scripts

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Well, I hope you found something useful or amusing in all that. If you did, tell someone. In these new digital days, endeavours like this live or die on word of mouth. And I’m not ready to die yet. There’s still too much to do, and I want to see what tomorrow looks like. You and me, we’ll get to see the sun again. Not bad. Take care of yourself.

W