It’s been a full-on day of banking, admin and crisis management so far. Here are some other things happening today:
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Our minds are full of things that are dead and yet that we live for and couldn’t live without.
Buy a pack of A4-ish whiteboards. Like these, maybe. Get a pack of Command Hooks. Get a box of large paperclips like these ones I use. Choose your own whiteboard markers. Choose a calendar at Vertex42, download it and print it off.
Decide what you need to keep track of. What’s on deck right now, what’s pending, things to do that you don’t want to forget about, your call sheet, project statuses, availabilities, things you’re waiting to hear about — you decide what you need to be aware of at a glance.
Stick the Command Hooks to the wall. They go on easy and come off easy. Put a clip on the top edge of a whiteboard in portrait orientation. Hang it off a Command hook. Keep going until you have as many whiteboards as you want. Clip the calendar together and hang it off a Command Hook.
If you’ve got the space, get yourself a great big central whiteboard too. But those cost money and the headline is On The Cheap. This is, really, everything you need to run a writing career aside from your main writing tool and your notebook. You can get fancy with filing information and “productivity” systems another time. Get started with analogue and the essentials. And some music.
Alive! But taking a day off. Between one thing and another, it’s been eight or nine days of twelve-hour sessions at the keyboard. I filed the first draft of a creative document last thing Sunday night. And I could keep doing it, but from this point it will get progressively harder to do so and I’ll be back to eating painkillers for breakfast. So the plan is to bail out of the office this afternoon and tend to the garden. This job may not be breaking rocks, but it kicks the shit out of us in many other ways, and one day I’ll stop growing back the bits that fall off when I pull long sequences of twelve- and sixteen-hour days.
INBOX: 73, I’ll handle email after 5pm
LISTENING:
OUTSIDE: is where I’m going. I had to get up twice in the middle of the night to take painkillers, so it’s definitely time to get away from screens and keys. Tend plants and write in notebook. Yes.
- New GAIKA record. I met him once. Talked for some hours. Lovely guy.
- 12,000 year old flutes made from bird bones
- Edvard Munch’s summer house
70s Sci-Fi art shows off a small collection of what are probably now curiosities. Here in Britain, weekly comics (which they mostly were) did both a Summer Special issue and a big hardback Annual at Christmas. One of the things I looked forward to at Xmas as a kid was getting one or two Annuals. It was really nice to see some again. That’s a Brian Bolland cover. I was lucky enough to hit a bucket list item very early in my career – Brian Bolland did the cover for the first issue of my first monthly comics job, HELLSTORM for Marvel.
American comics sometimes did annuals – I think they went out of fashion at some point there. But British comics were anthologies, and so the summer specials annuals had really wide ranges of material. often by new or obscure artists, and were stuffed with articles. Garth Ennis and I both learned out to write comics from the printing of one page of John Wagner/Alan Grant script in a 2000AD Summer Special.
It was 12 when I went outside at 1015. Summer may finally be arriving. But the gales are still blowing and biting, which makes attending to plants and handling seedlings next to impossible, and I have to aim the hose two feet to the side of any plant I want to water in order to get the water to hit the plant.
Today is for typing up my notes on the game consult gig and start filling them out. The USD/UKP exchange rate bit me overnight, so I may have to hustle a bit harder next week than I’d planned on.
ON DECK: Twelve hours in the chair.
INBOX: 77
LAST WATCHED: I somehow found myself playing all three EXPENDABLES films in the office while working. I always found Stallone an interesting writer. One day someone might restore PARADISE ALLEY with all the grace notes that were reportedly cut.
OUTSIDE: “A 6,000-Year-Old Slab of Carved Wood Predating Stonehenge Has Been Found in Berkshire, England”
SHIPPING FORECAST: Back Monday, though I may log plant photos over the weekend.
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
I will say that I’ve been really slack on LTD, and notemaking in general, this year so far.
On Creating THE AUTHORITY With Bryan Hitch
MISTER MAMMOTH, Matt Kindt & Jean-Denis Pendanx
FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS, Ian Penman
The City Is Ribbed For Your Pleasure
New arrivals I have to get situated at some point today.
Over the last four or five days, I’ve generated something like sixty pages of material. Now I need to switch gears for a day, get into the new consulting job (for a games company) and start the newsletter. And pot some seedlings. Which will all begin as soon as I can see straight and my tinnitus stops whistling (I’m probably just dehydrated).
Oops, forgot to press send on this. Woke up a little late, so late breakfast: eggs from our chickens (we just took in three new rescues, the last of the spring onions from the garden, mandolined chorizo:
Next up, a watermelon, apple, pineapple and spinach smoothie. Then smoked fish and mixed leaves and sliced Romano pepper with cheese and walnut and harissa drizzle. Trying to keep on top of diet. Carbs and protein tonight. I’m into a sustained work period now, and eating properly is always the first thing to slip when I’m pulling twelve-hour days at the keyboard.
That said, I think I’m going to go outside for a bit.
Today is June 8, which is apparently World Brain Tumour Day. A doctor thought I had one once, and told my partner to give him a call in the morning if I was still alive. Good morning computer.
Sean Bonner’s CONNECTIONS photographs.
Venkatesh Rao on something I briefly considered some years ago, done, of course, more intelligently and in more depth:
Here is the thing: There is no good reason for the source and destination AIs to talk to each other in human language, compressed or otherwise, and people are already experimenting with prompts that dig into internal latent representations used by the models. It seems obvious to me that machines will communicate with each other in a much more expressive and efficient latent language, closer to a mind-meld than communication, and human language will be relegated to a “last-mile” artifact used primarily for communicating with humans. And the more they talk to each other for reasons other than mediating between humans, the more the internal languages involved will evolve independently. Mediating human communication is only one reason for machines to talk to each other.
Gave up on trying to grow rosemary from seed for a while, got sick of never having rosemary to hand, so I ordered some plants, and of course they turned up today when I’m racing to get stuff done in the office