It is properly autumnal out there, chilly and rainy and dark.
Things are likely to be a bit chaotic here this week, as we’ve suffered a loss in our close friends circle – I may be a little slow with email for a few days.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Released On: 24 Jun 2023Available for 3 daysFresh off the release of their first studio record in ten years, legendary Icelandic post-rock and ambient band Sigur Rós pick two hours of absorbing ambient music to help you focus, including Frakkur, Carl Stone, Gavin Bryars and more. And, of course, new music from Sigur Rós and their collaborators.
I have an eight-page comics job that I need to get out in a single sitting today, so I’m at the desk until it’s done.
The wonderful people at Zoharum Records occasionally send me a small package of things I’ve never heard of before.
I am especially liking the next one:
For when you become a person of a certain age who needs to get their shit together. Especially when that person often forgets to eat. Not pictured: the bag of B12 megadoses that I have put down and forgotten about.
ON DECK: Today I have to start putting the newsletter together, among other things.
INBOX: 77
SLEEP: for the first time in many years, I tracked last night’s sleep. I will not be logging that here, I don’t think! But it has an interesting metric called “restoration” -how restoring was my sleep? 92% – restless sleep. It also appears my resting heart rate has been creeping up overnights.
LISTENING: BABYLONIAN BLISS.
READING: I seem to be having trouble finding something I really want to read. I usually start my re-reading and catch-up reading projects in the autumn and winter, but I’m tempted to read 2666 again, and also Schrader’s book on cinema that has the long new foreword on Slow Cinema. Which I’ve read three or four times, but somehow always find new things in. I know I have a PDF copy of SCULPTING IN TIME somewhere that I’d like to convert for the Kindle just to have it handier at night than my print copy, but I doubt that would actually work.
There’s a certain… turning inward happening in my head right now. I may try to unpack it a bit in the newsletter.
Addition to this: I found the Fitbit Charge 5 on sale. It seems to be the state of the art. A little too watch-like for my taste, but I’m hoping there are settings I can fiddle with to make it a little less visually hot on the wrist – I don’t want to look like I wear two watches. It’s pretty water-resistant, apparently, and I’m not too worried about it getting banged up outside – the reason I don’t wear my old Apple Watch 2 while working in the garden, and why I bought a beater watch for that purpose.
Yesterday turned out to be somewhat stressful. Hoping today will be easier. Phone conference with a production company later.
ON DECK: the above, and hopefully getting some writing down in between things.
INBOX: 75
READING: ALL THE NERDS ARE DEAD, an essay I came across at the weekend. It ties a little into some recent thinking of my own, and also to the current state of popular culture – it was also noted elsewhere that there are four albums in the top ten by the same person and seven books in the top twenty by the same person at the moment. The author of the linked piece also observes:
It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation.
This is an interesting moment.
LAST WATCHED: I have a huge box set of Ingmar Bergman films that I started a few years ago but didn’t finish. I’m going to start again.
Well, we’re entering San Diego Comic Con week, which generally means nothing will happen anywhere until July 25. Nobody’s going to be reading anything, doing admin, answering email, anything. I have never liked the San Diego show, and, since my first visit in 1997, I have avoided it as much as possible. Consequently, this week has always been peaceful.
(The only time I enjoyed it was when I was contractually obliged to attend for the roll-out of RED, the film based on the graphic novella by Cully Hamner and myself. Never set foot on the actual convention floor once. I got to see how the movie people do San Diego, and it involves taking over a few floors of a hotel, riding in convoys of black cars, secure areas of the convention centre to hang out in, and secret entrances flanked by armed guards. Also having lunch with Helen Mirren, talking about Judge Dredd with Karl Urban and being surprise attacked by Bruce Willis. That was a good day.)
The garden has been wrecked by several days of high winds, and I probably need a full day just to put everything back and take up the plants that were killed by the gusts. (And the new young fox who is digging and trampling and chewing through the place.) But not today, as it’s still gusting and raining out there. I did manage to snack on a few raspberries right off the canes, though.
So today it’s back to work, so I can line up things to send as soon as the long SDCC weekend is over.
INBOX: who cares?
LISTENING: a bit of Sonnov today, while I get moving.
READING: I started reading a sample of SUPPLANTING THE POSTMODERN last night. But it turns out the book is eight years old, so maybe I need to look elsewhere for notions on the next new.
About ten years ago, I had a Fitbit Flex. Used it for years – I think it finally died circa 2019? Used it for steps and sleep tracking. Steps, I’m not good at, because my job requires me to sit on my backside all day, but the sleep tracking was very useful. Now I’m entering another stage of life, my sleep patterns are changing, my physical activity is scattered and my hydration is imperfect. So I went to look for a new tracking band. I have an Apple Watch 2, but its battery life sucks and I’m not sleeping with it on. Also: I wear a watch on my left wrist, and the Flex went on my right wrist. It looked like a black band. I do not want to look like I’m wearing two watches.
I am, broadly speaking, shit out of luck. And am disappointed to see that the technology and product development has not moved much over ten years.
The Fitbit Charge 5 would seem to be the new standard. And, because it’s 2023, you need to buy a subscription product on top of the device’s cost for the device to work properly. (There’s also a thing called the Whoop which is notionally “free” but doesn’t work at all without the purchase of a £200+/year subscription, which is a shame because it’s got the unobtrusive form factor I would want.) It is, however, basically a watch. There’s the Oura Ring, but those are bloody expensive and have to be shipped from the US.
Also curious: all the new fitness bands have dropped altimeter functions that track stairs climbed.
Also also: I have so many questions about this one:
When did the bottom fall out of this market? Are people really wearing their Apple Watches to bed?
It’s raining! Probably too late to save a lot of the plants, but I’ll take it! The pound is way too strong against the dollar! I will not take it! Desist!
(So much of my freelance life involves waiting for my own government to do something stupid that depresses the value of my own currency, because I get paid in dollars)
ON DECK: I have a phone conference later. I have a chunk of work to get done before that, and then a chunk of thinking to do afterwards. I decided on A Plan last night, and now I have to see if I can actually do it.
INBOX: 80
OUTSIDE: The Screen Actors Guild called their strike, joining the Writers Guild of America (my guild), the first time in sixty years there’s been a joint strike. Things will get weird quite quickly now, I suspect.
SHIPPING FORECAST: if I can get everything done today and tomorrow, I can spend Sunday in the garden! If there aren’t the promised 60mph gales!
New research puts age of universe at 26.7 billion years, nearly twice as old as previously believed
— Read on phys.org/news/2023-07-age-universe-billion-years-previously.html