Sudden craving for marmalade. God knows why. I’m just not good at summer eating. I’m an autumnal human.
America is having its very long weekend, and that’s a good excuse for me to turn everything off for a while. I’ll reactivate this log on Wednesday.
I don’t know how I rate being on the review comps list for Zoharum Records, but I am not complaining. Really looking forward to getting into these this week.
Enjoying the design choices for the food products now being offered by NOMA Projects. I never got to eat at NOMA, obviously; and, of course, now I never will, as the restaurant is closed. But I have read Rene Redzepi’s books (which are excellent), and even got to talk to him a couple of times back in the days when you could use Twitter to talk to people. And now they’re releasing food products, which promise the tiniest hint of what it must have been like to dine there. I really hope it works out for them.
The face of evil. Plant-murdering evil.
The story I’m working on is giving me trouble, and time is ticking away, so today it’s 13 hours in the chair, brute-forcing a full draft to the end. It will be filled with placeholders and Bad Writing, but until I get a version of the entire shape down, it’s just going to flop and flounder. Get it all down first, fix it later. And time is running out – the client needs the piece, and I woke up with pain in my hands, which means I have to stop pushing the keyboard time very soon. So today’s the day. It will be interspersed with deliveries, which will break my flow a bit, but I will get through it.
One of those deliveries should be a charging connector. Probably ten years ago now, I was gifted a Chromebook Pixel by Google Open Source. It is a beautiful writing machine. A few years back, I mislaid the power cord. Official replacements no longer exist, but I have the measurements of the jack, and I’m going to make a little project out of (hopefully) reviving the thing. It was such a joy to write on, and I remember it working pretty well outdoors, so I have plans of tethering it to the phone and writing on the patio under the lilac tree with a large vodka martini.
All I need to do now is convince the new Echo Buds to work properly or convince the old B&O earbuds to connect to the new phone.
I’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.
MY LAST BREATH, Luis Bunuel
INBOX: 104, but there’s a lot of receipts and notifications in there, and calls to set, and documents to review. Onwards.
I picked up a pair of the 1st generation Echo Buds when they came out, and found them a fairly low-cost, fairly impressive set of noise-cancelling, physically secure wireless earbuds that play nicely with an iPhone. Useful in the garden, as, unlike AirPods, even the AirPods Pro, they won’t fall out of my ears at the slightest excuse. I can chop wood and dig dirt with these in with no issues. They did, however, eventually start to die, and just when I was getting worried about them, one got lost. So, annoyed, I went to Amazon to price a replacement set. Turns out Amazon are readying a 3rd generation, which look like AirPods and, for some unfathomable reason, don’t have noise cancellation.
But! I wasn’t aware of a 3rd or a 2nd gen, so I hunted down the 2nd gen. Which, I guess in advance of the 3rd gen release, is being heavily discounted in the UK. Whee! And so, tomorrow morning, I can once again sit outside with the coffee in the morning, listen to ambient music and screen out the screams of the chickens demanding their breakfast.
(Which they are turning into eggs at such rapidity and volume that I am currently passing boxes of them to the neighbours.)
Anyway. I got my ears back, and on the cheap. If these are in any way comparable to the 1st gen, they will be a good solid cone-of-silence earbud that you can work in but which also works well with an iPhone.
I could have sworn I already owned this, but looked for it the other day and couldn’t find it. And then found a copy on Amazon UK for four quid. It is similarly cheap on Amazon elsewhere right now. The original RAID film was, of course, a revelation. But the second, with more money, more space and time and more characters (including a few whom people are likely to recognise from the later JOHN WICK 3), is a gloriously mad overload of a thing, hugely inventive in its action and a genre model to study.
At times sounding like a churning minimalist nightmare ritual, but on the other end, a beautiful but heavy duty trance inducing drupad veena performance on half speed.
I’m about to do a purge and burn on my RSS reader’s feeds, because it’s boring the shit out of me.
Nick Harkaway on the Russia/Wagner thing this weekend:
For me, among other weird things, it had the feel of a sandpit row played out huge, with money and tanks and death. The ordinary business of disagreement and bad blood, but rendered enormous (and – probably not a word – enormitous). Basically, in my context, a Titan argument.
I’m trying to put something non-fictional together on the madness of kings – or Titans – right now, and the world is just absolutely firehosing options onto the ground in front of me.
Jess Valice, artist and neuroscientist: “When is a good time to freak out?”
There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day. We have never been more exposed to devastating news stories, politics, war, fighting, and hunger. It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel. I would have a hard time painting someone crying. I don’t want to show you the release… I want to show something else. This idea of ‘crisis’ I think is so different now, and our methods of consuming information and coping with it are arguably far greater. Imagine 100 years ago hearing about a little button that someone could push that would wipe you out, there would be people screaming in the streets! I’m not sure we know when to freak out now, as we just perpetually cope in heightened states which again is where psychology comes into play. Why isn’t anyone freaking out? As we filter such enormous amounts of terrifying information via our screens, when is a good time to freak out? The figures are more gentle reflections of this intensity, so I want them to stop you and then bother you later. Take a photo and you revisit it to torture yourself, haha, searching for where that familiarity is.
The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not as dormant as had been thought, a new study shows.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });The slumbering giant woke up around 200 years ago to gobble up some nearby cosmic objects before going back to sleep, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
FANTASTIC PLANET, via.
The heat spike has passed — had to abandon the office entirely yesterday — the criminal squirrel has killed a couple more of my plants, and a young urban fox has taken a pathological dislike to a potted redcurrant tree. The house is retaining a lot of heat – these old terraced houses are built to retain it, not disperse it — but it’s cool enough to let me get back to the keyboard. Yesterday was me just slumped on the sofa downstairs scribbling in a notebook until my hand started to stick to the pages
ON DECK: I am now seriously behind schedule – I need to get about eighty pages of material out this week, which is not ideal.
INBOX: 90, but that’s mostly laziness and the fact that I prefer to be at the desk when I archive email and process admin and financial stuff.
READING: MY LAST BREATH, Luis Bunuel
LAST WATCHED: rewatched all of SUCCESSION. That was a clever story.
SHIPPING FORECAST: I have a lot of thinking to do this week.
