People ask, reasonably, why someone who wants to write about the history of computing insists on drafting by hand. The honest answer is not romance. It is that a notebook cannot autosave over itself, cannot sync a bad decision to three other devices before I have caught it, and cannot be closed by accident mid-thought.
The footage is from a café I will not name, because they let me sit for four hours over one coffee and I would like to keep being allowed to do that. What the frame does not show is the argument I was having with an idea that will not yet resolve into a shape - not a book, not really, just a stubborn cluster of Soviet computing footnotes I cannot stop reading.
Typing comes later, once a sentence has decided what it is and only needs to be made presentable. The notebook is where it is still allowed to be wrong. I am on my third one this year, which either means the idea is moving or I am stalling in a very productive-looking way.