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Category: status

status

28sep19

(LOT 2046 notebook)

I’m in prep for the jump to New York, now, at the same time as a lot of work stuff surfaces all at once. #1000mphclub in full effect. The term comes from something my manager said to me when the tv side of my business took on its own velocity – right now it’s 1000 mph or nothing at all.

I’ve had to buy two extra A4 whiteboards for the office wall to keep track of shit.

Eliminating extraneous stress and anxiety is never easy, not least because there are always people and processes that want you to experience stress and anxiety. But, a few years since the Brain Thing That Nearly Killed Me, I’ve had to accept that I cannot think and work when I let things trigger the hypertensive stress cascade – that, in fact, a majority of the issues I had in the ten years previous to the Brain Thing were, in fact, down to it going undiagnosed and unmanaged after the first Brain Thing in my mid-thirties.

Never too late to learn new things, including new ways of working and being in the world (or away from it). Never too late to learn how to put your back to the wind and go a thousand miles an hour.

It is 1230pm, I’ve been up two and a half hours, and I just hit inbox zero. I am listening to FROZEN PASSAGES by Poemme and I have a comic to finish writing. Good morning.

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STATUS: Cats

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Screen Status September 2019

To other people, this home screen probably looks impossibly noisy. For me, this is what being out of the world looks like. No social media on the front page – those apps are buried in the back with notifications turned off.

Five instances of news, if you include Reeder for RSS. WhatsApp is mostly for family, Signal is for work and close friends who hate WhatsApp. App In The Air is on the front page because I have travel coming up. The blue icon next to the phone app is Spark for email, and the red one next to that is Downcast for podcasts.

Soma FM because I spend a lot of nights on my own and its Drone Zone channel helps me sleep. BBC Sounds because I’m British. And Wikipanion may be the single most useful app I have: literally the biggest encyclopedia on the planet accessed by a touchpoint on a bit of glass.

Oh, and those are three different note-taking apps in the top right because I just can’t settle on one.

For me, this is, perversely, the quiet phone. Every action available on the home screen demands direct considered intent and every result output is teaching or calming. When your brain and heart try to kill you every now and then, and you still have a lot of work to do, this is part of what living in the contemporary condition needs to look like.

What does yours look like? Do you think about this? Or am I finally sliding from pre-senile to actual-senile?

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STATUS 23sep19

Above found in the new issue of NEURAL magazine.

Inbox: 10. It’s 19.2 C on the Thames Delta, with a cold drizzle on the way, and I’m giving a listen to Any Given Moment by Ben Rath. Writing Batman all day. I am some 452,000 hours old. I require more coffee.

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STATUS 22sep19

No idea where this came from, I just found it in the office.

This week has been a heavy thinking week, and on those weeks everything gets subsumed into the thinking, including writing anything here. I just forget about everything that isn’t the thing in my head I need to solve.

Inbox: 14. Listening: THE SERPENT’S GIFT, Temple Ov Saturn.

I need to be working on a script today, but Venkatesh Rao, as is his wont, put this terrible Twitter thread in my head, the tl;dr of is:

In general blogs are way overdue for reinvention.

That’s going to bug me for days and weeks, I just know it is.

Not least because WordPress Special Circumstances helped me out on the basis that I “do interesting things” on WordPress, and I don’t feel like I ever justified that opinion.

More things to think about. Just what I needed.

STATUS: still alive. The Indian Summer here seems to have ended. There was a chill on the breeze yesterday, and winter’s coat mantled the shade. Today there is a misty Nordic rain making the trees whisper. Autumn is here.

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16sep19

Stopped in to do a thing at BBC 6 Music, despite not being the musician Warren Ellis.

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9sep19

I am technically on a blurb-writing moratorium for the rest of the year, but when Sean McDonald told me he had a book by an old acquaintance, I had to give in. This arrived today from MCD. Thanks, mate. I love the publishing economy.

Inbox 24 / 12 C / status: whisky

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6sep19

We are doing autumn over here.

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4sept19

Working on THE BATMAN’S GRAVE today, and since I already had a long call with my long-suffering Netflix exec this morning, I should be able to stay on this script until midnight. Inbox 13, and hopefully that tide won’t rise too much higher while I find my focus. Listening to SOLILOQUY FOR LILITH by Nurse With Wound. It is a temperate 20 C on the Thames Delta, and I really need more coffee now.

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