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Category: jotter

jotter

Published March 3, 2024 by Warren Ellis

So I have a chunk missing out of one finger now, but it was worth it. One month ago, I started the raised bed. Today. I repaired the sides – one with a plastic spike and one with duct tape ugh. Raked it over, pulled out a log that had magically risen to the surface (I have a plan for it), added a forty-litre bucket of compost from Bin 1, a few kilos of grit, half a bag of Perlite and around 75 litres of peat free compost, mixed and raked and levelled it. Hammered in the hoops. Made A-frames.

Planted Red Baron onion sets, nasturtium Black Velvet, Scorpius spinach, borage and Gniff carrot. That’s about half the bed. Leaving the other half until end of month, when I can sow beetroot, parsnip, cornflower and whatever else I think I can fit in it. I just covered it in fleece again because we’re about to have another cold night. Should be the last one for a while, so I’ll take the fleece off in the morning.

And then wrestled the netting over. It’s not quite pinned down all around — it needs to relax a bit. So right now it’s just ziptied to the hoops and stretched over the A-frames until it calms down. I doubt it will protect completely against the cats, foxes and squirrels that make this patch such a nightmare, but I can at least make it harder for them. I’m going to spread the top with grit and organic Slug-Fuck-Off end of the coming week.

Now it’s time to wash out the propagator and start some peppers and tomatoes indoors.

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Finally, A Proper Cocktail Mixing Spoon

Published February 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Most cocktails I make need stirring, not shaking. I needed a proper mixing spoon for making in a cocktail shaker to be strained into the serving glass.

Observe, from the end of SUCCESSION, someone making a martini correctly:

(I loved that attention to detail in the smallest things.)

I mean, it’s all to taste. Stanley Tucci shakes a Negroni. I can’t imagine why, but that’s how he likes it.

THE CHERRY NEGRONI

Build up in a shaker with some ice cubes in the bottom.

One measure cherry gin

One measure Campari

One measure rose vermouth

One teaspoon reserved syrup from jar of cherries preserved in kirsch

Stir, strain into serving glass, add a dash of soda to open it up, serve to someone else because gin is poison made in bathtubs by criminals

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Published February 14, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I’ve made a couple of attempts to do a newspaper-strip style comics series online, and I never cracked it to my total satisfaction. Still in the bucket list – a daily single-tier newspaper style strip.

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Published February 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

  • Say what you like about Amazon, and we all do, but my Echo Buds stopped working this morning, I spent ten minutes in an online chat with Amazon to try and figure it out, and they immediately sent new Buds that will arrive tomorrow. I had a similar experience several years ago with a dead Kindle. They do have the whole “customer delight” thing down pat.
  • Deactivating the broken plug-in that took down the site this morning has changed all the displaying fonts. Not sure I’m happy with how it looks, but I’m a week away from having the time to do anything about it. It may be time for a site-wide theme and appearance overhaul.

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Show Don’t Tell Is A Tool Not A Rule

Published January 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The most-often repeated piece of advice in visual storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” As I have railed before, this leads to the most egregious repeating moment in television: “You need to see this,” someone is told over a communications device, and then it cuts to that person standing with some other people looking at the thing they apparently need to see. This is because the writers have had “show, don’t tell” dinned into their heads.

AND THEN SOMEONE TELLS THEM WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING AT ANYWAY.

Seriously, pick any bit of action tv, particularly streaming, and see if it happens in exactly that way. See how many times it happens. See how many times it happens in a single episode.

It’s a principle. Not a rule. Everyone else may treat it like a rule, but it’s not and you don’t have to.

There’s a bit in the old British show WAKING THE DEAD where crime scene manager Frankie tells prickly insane Detective Superintendent Boyd over a radio link, “Boyd, you need to see this.” And Boyd yells “Just bloody tell me!” Whoever wrote that is my comrade.

It slows things down. You need to choose slowing things down, not accepting it because you think there’s a rule that must be followed.

Like most things, show-don’t-tell is fine in its place. But it’s not connective tissue. It’s a bad end-of-scene gambit, it eats up useful time, it’s so over-used that it creates no anticipation or potential energy any more, and it’s not interesting. Images and words can strike sparks off each other with their frictions. The words can be telling a slightly different story than the image, and thereby enrich each other with meaning. If you want emotion, then emotion comes in the telling of something, not always the showing of it. Show don’t tell is a tool, not a rule – choose when to use it and you’ll surprise your audience.

-from my newsletter, 10 September 2023

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Permission To Dream

Published January 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I remember a piece by Harry Harrison – maybe in HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS – where he had to explain to his mother in law that when he was sitting staring at a wall for hours, he was in fact working. I imagine most writers will tell you three things about thinking time – it’s the most valuable work, the most frustrating work, and the least billable. Very few people in this world get paid for the hours spent staring at the wall. And it’s always frustrating, because what you want is for the form of a story to just drop into your head after thirty minutes in the chair, and that very rarely happens. It’s days or weeks of wandering around inside your own head and its stores, which looks to the rest of the world like you’ve become a vegetable creature whose circumnutations do nothing but slowly capture and engulf pieces of chocolate.

Yes, we are all outwardly lazy bastards — and if you are entering the journey of a creator of stories now, then be advised — you’re allowed to stare at the wall for as long as you damn well like and need to. Those days and weeks of farting around within the walls of your mind are what every piece of art people love come from. Every story you ever adored? Someone sat around like a piece of meat propped on a sofa until it happened. There are no lazy writers. It just takes some of us longer to get off the sofa and put the pen “on the attack against the innocent paper.”

(That line is from Olga Tokarczuk.)

You have permission to dream other lives and whole new worlds for as long as it takes.

— from my newsletter, 5 November 2023

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Setting Intentions For 2024

Published December 28, 2023 by Warren Ellis

Briefly in the office to do some admin: not back at work, but whittling down the inbox and unsubscribing a bunch of blogs out of the RSS reader.

The other day, I had this notion to try and repurpose an old Amazon Fire 8 tablet as an ambient information radiator of some kind. I was rigging it up when I caught myself and said, what the hell am I doing? Do I really need a glanceable radiating thing in the office? I have a very specific set of intentions for 2024, and putting another radiating talking thing in the office may not be the best use of my little space. I’ve only just gotten my phone down to the Swiss Army knife thing I want it to be. I had a cheap Android tablet in my Amazon cart in case I couldn’t get the Fire to do what I wanted, and I deleted it from the cart there and then.

I had a flash of notions around this, and I wasn’t in reach of a notebook at the time. I wrote down what I remembered yesterday, and it boils down to: a low-signal year.

I’ve removed from my RSS anything that hasn’t updated in the last 18 months, anything that tends to pile up and anything I tend to skim through rather than want to read. I’m about to clear up the number of emails I get from Bandcamp – they go to a separate folder in my email and there are currently 597 emails in it. And then I’m going to opt out of some newsletters.

On the wall, the big whiteboard is two-thirds full with stuff I need to write, the Pending board is almost full, and I need to clear down and rewrite the Status and To-Do boards. I have Wants and Schemes, this year, and whether they come to fruition or not, whether I need to pivot mid-year or not, I want to stick to the Wants and Schemes ruthlessly.

Your best work will always come from following your instincts, creating something that you personally wish to see in the world, not what you think other people are longing for.

I’ve always stuck by this concept, for better or worse (usually worse). What I hope to do in 2024 is about that: taking out almost all of the outside voices, and working with my internal stores. Low-incoming, low-distraction, intentional viewing of films and reading of books and essays, making best use of the daylight hours and walking away from the screen when I’m stuck, to go outside and work with my hands and think. Low signal and high focus. In the words of the late and much missed Benjamin Zephaniah, I Have A Scheme.

Writing all this down here sets the intention and makes me accountable to myself. I look forward to explaining to myself in June 2024 about how and why it all went wrong.

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Published December 7, 2023 by Warren Ellis

New printer has arrived. Good news, it’s twice the size of the old one while doing exactly the same stuff, only with a stupid capacitive touchscreen. And it’s immediately updating itself.

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Published December 4, 2023 by Warren Ellis

It was in fact the power supply, and that cranky ancient Epson printer has been stuck in a black bag and sent back to Hell. So much for getting shit done today: after an hour’s research, I’ve ordered a cheap HP printer, and will presumably lose a day later this week to installing it, because all printers are bad.

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Seeds For 2024 Have Arrived

Published November 25, 2023 by Warren Ellis

I got an unexpected royalty check and decided to hit the seed catalogues. Note to self: they’re in a bag in the utility room next to the roasting tins. The previous bag is in the utility room drinks cupboard at the back, top shelf, behind that weird vermouth. Now I have amended soil, some clear beds and the garden shredder to clear and mulch the others, I can spend the winter clearing up, rebuilding and pruning, and try lots of stuff next spring.

Next up: shopping for some fig trees, as the one I bought last year did not do anything, to the point where I suspect it arrived as a dead stick in some dirt rather than as a dormant living plant.

Yes, none of these are flowers. Do not tell my partner. I want a little food forest. I think I can probably get most of the way there next year, now I have deeper knowledge of the issues I’m facing on this small patch of the Thames Delta.

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