Cartoon Gravity 37
Hello and welcome to another Sunday. I find myself emerging from another period of digital indecision, as I mess around trying to figure what apps I need to do what (and then inevitably end up writing whatever-it-is down on a piece of paper). I won't bore you with the ups and downs of this particular round, suffice to say that I have used ALL of the apps and I now hate ALL of the apps. Right now, anything that best resembles an old typewriter (Ulysses) wins.
One thing that Ulysses has revealed itself to be unexpectedly good at it publishing to Micro.blog, where I opened an account yesterday. Micro.dot (which is pronounced "microdot blog", presumably because that sounds marginally cooler) is a timeline-based publishing format that "federates", which is a stupid term meaning that your post is sent out to Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and wherever else you want it to be seen.
What is the point of that? Well, if we started asking for a point, the entire tech industry would collapse, wouldn't it? Pretty much every bit of software (looking at you, "AI") created in the last decade is the digital equivalent of a leaf blower; an expensive, noisy, anti-social, environmentally disastrous answer to a problem no one had.
What I think I like about micro-blogging is that it allows me to post random thoughts, links, idea, images etc, that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE might find interesting or useful, without the pressure of having to frame said thing inside a "worthwhile" blog post. The fact that it "federates" also means that I am feeding the social media beast, for whatever that's worth, without having to take the full firehose of hateful nonsense directly in the face.
Yes OF COURSE it would be easier, and infinitely more sensible, to just not engage with any of it. But the simple fact is that sometimes I see or read something that I think other people might get a kick out of and I feel good about passing those things on. So sue me.
If you want to follow my micro.blog separately, it's at https://cartoongravity.micro.blog/, because some bastard had already taken my name.
Wednesday Wonders
Wednesday Wonders has made it into its third chapter, which is encouraging. It's more of what I've just been talking about - five interesting things that seem worth sharing, posted every Wednesday.
Cartoon Gravity Pro
Recently, for Pro subscriber, I wrote the first in a series of pieces on directing, and yesterday I put up a piece about world-building and the apps that help with it.
The Pro subscription is available at £5 per month, and it really helps keep this place going. You can get to it by clicking the "Account" or "Subscribe" banner at the top of the home page.
The week(s) gone by...
I think I'm right in saying that I didn't post last week...? That was largely because we had A-level results day (the kid got into her first choice Uni), which comes with as much anxiety as anyone should reasonably be expected to cope with on a Thursday in August, and so work got delayed and chucked onto the weekend and I didn't have the time for this kind of frivolity.
Most of the time has been taken up with a rewrite of a movie script that I am stupidly hoping I will finally get to make. Whatever happens, the rewrite was fun because I hadn't touched the script for a while. I moved the whole thing into Scrivener, which allowed me to quite ruthlessly break it down into tiny pieces and put it back together again. Scrivener is great for this, better than anything else I've found, and the process was pleasingly surgical. I think the result is a much better script, but it has gone out for the weekend read, so we'll see if I'm the only one who thinks that.
Crowley is crawling forward - this is a DIFFICULT one, because I'm not used to being bound by facts. I am assured that the unusual nature of the project is likely to cause my brain to produce "cognitive reserve" which is a great thing for my neurological future, so that's nice. Right now, all it's doing is giving me headaches.
I also had a bunch of meetings on a new US TV project, prompted by me sending out a spec script a few weeks ago. There seems to be a lot of interest, which is nice. The show is a procedural, which I have not tackled from scratch before, and there seems to be a healthy appetite for it. To whet your own appetites, I will simply say that the one-line pitch is "The X-Files meets Fringe against a background of occult New York." It features ghosts, monsters and secret rooms beneath the New York Public Library. I hope we get to make it.
The week to come
Next week involves the kid's 18th birthday, so I'm not expecting it to be particularly work-intensive, though I would like to get back to the feature script I'm working on, and blow the dust off the novel I'm writing in any spare moments.
I'm also psyched to get properly into Lev Grossman's "The Bright Sword". I LOVED the Magicians books as much as I have ever loved anything, and now Grossman is tackling the Knights of the Round Table in a really fun, modern style.
A few links to finish, for which I am using GoodLinks, which I recently discovered and which allows you not only to save interesting things with one click, but makes the entire piece available to read offline, sans adverts, on any device.
First up, where would we be without a new Spaces piece?
The Spaces Team
This bolt-action pen is pricey BUT it can handle 100 different refills, which means that it will almost certainly accommodate your writing instrument of choice. The same people (BigIdeaDesign) also seem to have absolutely nailed the perfect backpack:
A few more from the vault:
Ross Andersen
Jennifer Walker
Tom May
That's it from me. Enjoy Sunday.
Fuck it. Send.