I have to figure out the back end of this story progression today so I can rewrite and do the detail work tomorrow and start scripting Saturday and last night I stalled out at 1130pm so into the mines I go. Happy Beltane.
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Chive plant arrived yesterday (I’ve so far had no luck growing them from seed).
Today marks the end of full-on Lab Mode. By the weekend I need to be in Production Mode during daytime, and stay there for around three months. I may squander part of today’s time by going out to hard-prune the buddleia that’s growing over compost bin two, if the weather stays good. But mostly it’s about finishing some thoughts and prepping for the three days of outline generation from notes that I need done by end of play Friday to set up the next four weeks of production.
Inbox cut back to 48, what remains is mostly just stuff I want to access easily. 1110am and all’s well.
One of the fig plants is leafing up nicely. Don’t know if they’ll fruit this year, but at least they’re alive.
The sun is finally out today, so I’m hoping to carve out a couple of hours to attend to plants before the rain and gales come back.
The spam bots seem to have figured out how to defeat double-opt-in when subscribing to the newsletter. I’ve spent time over the last few days deleting them out of the subscriber base by hand. This means I’m constantly checking, constantly looking at the stats, looking at the open rate and waiting for spam reports to appear. I have therefore made the executive decision to say Fuck It and ignore the stats from now on. Making a shortcut that takes me straight to the new-post window and past the dashboard. I’ll look in once a month, and if crucial figures have fallen hard, I’ll take a torch to the list using some kind of automation.
Can’t help but wonder if someone’s yoked Gmail to a LLM and figured out how to get past Captcha gates and automated the opt-in responses.
OPERATIONS: Newsletter went out yesterday. I have two story documents and one dev document in front of me that I really want to get into – an artist and I are talking about doing a big project together and the references we’re throwing around are wonderfully crazy.
COMMS: Inbox 59.
LISTENING:
READING: re-reading some Artaud for work reasons (UK) (US+)
LAST WATCHED: There was a new episode of MOONSHINERS: MASTER DISTILLER. Go ahead, judge me.
It has been raining for eighteen hours and he is not amused.
I will have to push my planned outside work to tomorrow, and spend today at the keyboard. Which is fair enough, because there are some things I want to test and reconfigure on this notebook, which I can do in between building story documents.
The weather evened out for a short period late yesterday afternoon, so I potted the peas I raised from seed in the mini-greenhouses. Once again, the gemination rate on the Kelvedon was terrible. Hopefully this will be the last day I have to run the heater in the office to get my hands moving in the morning. Watching the weather forecast, as I really need to sow more veg before the end of the month. Right now, it’s just high winds and rain again…
OPERATIONS: I need to break out something from the main notebook into its own notebook tonight. I had a project fall apart on me at the top of the month, right at the last second, and then some consulting work got moved up, and then an artist whose work I love came to me to ask to create something, so it’s twelve weeks of Production Mode in a daytime block and then Lab Mode the rest of the time. I set Sunday’s newsletter last night in a bit of a scramble because I have to go out today.
COMMS: Email is a little out of control. If we’re currently in conversation, I’ll be answering email all weekend. Otherwise, ask me for my messaging apps.
LISTENING:
I have just had to order cotton buds in order to make slow-watering containers – basically, ghetto ollas, using old water bottles with the bases chopped off and holes poked in them that are then stuffed with cotton buds so the water leaks out slowly. Bury the pointy end in the pot and fill with water. Trading off microplastic deposits in the soil for water availability for the fruit trees if we get another fiery summer. The tomatoes will be ready for their final big pot in a few weeks, inside the busted mini-greenhouse that is being repurposed as a trellis, and I’ll try the first one in there. People say gardening is relaxing, and, while learning again to live with the seasons is certainly interesting, growing food is basically one long low-level crisis management session.
Well, I had all kinds of plans for this morning, and then one of the chickens died in their sleep – these rescue chickens often don’t last long, the damage is done by the time we get them and they can pop off at any time. It’s a shame, and I thought this one was recovering well. So I was digging a hole first thing today, and I’m waiting for my hands to return to normal after jamming the shovel through clay.
I have way too many windows and tabs open, and it’s bloody freezing. Switching everything off until I get some focus back.
So yesterday I blasted out a draft of the tv document, then went downstairs, grabbed my notebook, and started a consult job, filling probably a dozen pages in the notebook, and then went to bed. Forgetting to put my alarm on. It seems I slept for nine hours and forty-two minutes. I am not yet in my body.
“I got support through the weather to make space music.”
- Lee Perry, in David Toop’s OCEAN OF SOUND
Lab mode. Everything for at least the next ten days is development and invention.
I’ve spent most of the last two days in couch potato mode, with very little useful mental activity, punctuated by bursts of physical activity curtailed by weather. In theory, I watched most of three BOTTOM shows and rewatched the BOTTOM docu, but honestly I retain very little about them and suspect I was just staring into space most of the time.
I have a stack of magazines to go through tonight. Unsubscribed from a couple more newsletters. Thinned the RSS subs a little more. Putting myself on a new music purchase ban for a little while, aside from specific collections I’m trying to make. Same with books, I think – my Kindle unread/part-read pile is too big.
Switching to internal resources, is how I think of it. I have to pull a lot of stuff out of my head over the next ten days, and I don’t need to get distracted by shiny new things.
Listened to this before sleep last night via the Bandcamp app – I’d forgotten I owned it.
I have now purchased 1413 records through Bandcamp, apparently.