Cartoon Gravity 33
The week online...
I've been working to make the site a little less complicated and a little more fun (especially after last weeks deathly boring admin bulletin). Here's what went up this week:
Getting Started with Notebooks
2025-06-05 - which was a bunch of links about sinkholes, salamanders and colour science
Those were posted to the site but, under the Everything All The Time scheme, many people also received them via e-mail. You might want to sign up for that one if you're not using RSS but want to know what's happening.
The first Cartoon Gravity Pro piece went out yesterday, entitled Why I Still Believe In Movies.
Over on the Pleasant Green site, the first two chapters of the new De Kliek serial are up for paid subscribers, with the third to follow in the next day or so. A scheme over there to use members' names as character names (in return for a year's free subscription) is working out really well, not least because people have amazing names!
Cartoon Gravity Pro members should note that your subscription entitles you to a 20% discount on a monthly Pleasant Green subscription - details here.
The week in real life...
A growing dissatisfaction/suspicion of communication software has led to me diverting all my e-mail addresses to my Proton Mail account and using their desktop and phone apps as my interface with the world. E-mail on Proton is incredibly secure. It's not like I'm sharing state secrets, or plans for the coming insurrection, but there's some comfort in knowing that I'm sending the digital equivalent of sealed letters, rather than postcards. I've had a Proton account since the service started and it is rock solid. There are very few bells and whistles, which suits me fine; mail comes in, mail goes out, and there is no temptation to fiddle with anything because there's nothing to fiddle with.
My overall attempts to be less-tethered to my computer are working out relatively well. Bullet journaling is still working nicely, and the arrival of my writing box this week certainly made the idea of working analogue a lot more attractive.
Movie-wise, I saw Sinners (finally) this week, which was great, and we watched Mountainhead last night, which is also, despite being very much a TV movie, incredibly good. I'm currently reading Alien Earths by Lisa Kaltenegger, which is an eye-opening, and incredibly readable account of the search for extra-terrestrial life.
As an aside, I hate Amazon as much as the next sentient human, but running a search for a non-Amazon link to Alien Earths just then led me to the Penguin website, where the link to the book was completely broken, and to Foyles, which couldn't load the page and, when it finally did, took me to the harback edition with no indication that the paperback was available (you have to do a separate search for that!) If anyone in the book trade is still wondering why Amazon is slaying everyone else, it's not JUST cheap labour and lots of money, they're also competent on a basic level.
Last month, I bought three blu-rays from a UK competitor to Amazon. Where Amazon were offering next day delivery, these guys took three weeks to send me two discs. The third never showed up at all and now I have to bug them for a chunk of my money back. I really want to support smaller retailers, but they do need to at least pretend like they give a shit.
On a more positive note, I ordered a new desk chair a few weeks ago from Online Ergonomics, and the company this week got in touch (by telephone, no less) to say that their courier was refusing to accept the order because my address doesn't exist. Don't get me started on courier companies; I live in a giant mansion block that has sat on a busy crossroads for over a hundred years. Google Maps drops a pin right on top of this room when you put the postcode in. If a Deliveroo bike can get here without any problems, I don't know what UPS's excuse is. Anyway, there being an impasse with the computer-says-no courier company, the Online Ergonomics people immediately made arrangements for one of their own guys to drive the thing down from Suffolk this week. That is how you do it.
Another independent company that is impressing the hell out of me is the audiobook company XigXag. Run by a husband and wife team in Cornwall, they stock the same versions of the same books as everyone else, they have a great app and a really clever no-subscription pricing structure (books get cheaper the more you buy). They've also developed an innovative audio-text hybrid called the X-Book and, unlike Audible, have no intention of letting AI take over narration.
On Thursday we went to the launch of Sarah Pinborough's new novel We Live Here Now, which is a really cool reimagining of a haunted house story. (I read a proof a while back, so I'm not just regurgitating blurb here - it's very good, go get). Sarah's book is also available on audio, via XigXag.
Anything else?
The Cartoon Gravity Club continues to be a hive of very pleasant activity. It has become a really great place to hang out and I'm now toying with running some informal story workshops for Pro members on there. Get in touch if that's of interest, and check out the club if you haven't yet.
I'm looking to recruit as many Pro subscribers as possible, to make this site start paying for itself, so if you can help out, please do.
And I leave you with a little inspiration, for those of us who are of an age. I've been experimenting with the Timestripe app this morning, which kindly informed me that bestselling author Sidney Sheldon (see picture at the top - if you remember him, you are exactly who I'm talking to) started writing his first novel at the age of 53, and created Hart to Hart when he was 63. THERE IS STILL TIME!
Fuck it. Send.