Cartoon Gravity 40

Yesterday, I posted a piece titled "How to cope in 2026". If that is your bag, have at it - it's staying this side of the paywall for a week or so.

Monday to Thursday this week, we got the lion's share of the recording on "Crowley" done, in a flat in Pimlico.

The recording went really well and it was a pleasure to hear familiar character voices again after such a long time. All that's left to do now is some readings from Crowley's memoirs and a little bit of location recording at the end of January, which we're folding into the Mythos 4 sessions.

As noted in the "How to cope in 2026", 2025 has been a slow year for me work-wise. Persistence seems to be starting to pay off, though, and it looks as if we now have the finance together for the Bad Memories movie, which we plan to shoot in the summer. With independent film financing, there is a never a "moment" where you can pop champagne corks; the money slowly coalesces from various sources to the point where someone does the math and says "Oh, it looks like we have it all." And then you move forward, hoping that nothing goes wrong and that you will eventually find yourself on a set with the camera rolling. The math moment happened this week, so we are progressing with cautious optimism.

The same thing happened on another movie this week (they're like buses), so it's vaguely possible that I could be making two movies next year.

Elsewhere in the industry, Netflix made a successful bid to buy Warner Bros, which has sent various industry bodies into apoplexy, worried that the deal (which may not even go through) will break everything. Personally, I think it's too early to tell what the fallout from this will be, but I'm not generally as pessimistic about studio consolidation as some. That's not because I think it's a good idea, it's not. But I think when all the people who waste hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on tired franchise ideas and remakes of remakes get together and become one big, corporate blob, there is at least a chance that they create space for more sensible, creative companies to get into the theatrical space with more interesting movies. I am very prepared to be wrong about this, but fortunately it doesn't matter what I think.

Some bits and pieces...

This week, I have been obsessing over Bon Iver's album, "Sable, fable", which I think is their best yet. For anyone interested in a deep dive, here is the album commentary video:

I also finished watching all ten seasons (plus spin-off show) of The Blacklist. Across 200+ episodes it is, of course, patchy. But there is some serious gold in there. The last two seasons are pretty weak compared to the first eight but the finale is good and the show does have a proper ending. I generally prefer the long-running network shows to limited season streaming shows (Although shout out to "The Beast In Me" on Netflix, which is excellent), and for me The Blacklist is a very strong example of the form.

From a piece by Ryan Holiday on reading:

The rule for quitting books is one hundred pages minus your age. Meaning: as you age, you have to endure crappy books less and less. I give books a little more time than my 95 year old grandmother does.

(In the same piece, he says you should always read with a pen in your hand, which I heartily disagree with.)

I seem to have managed to trim my app stack right down of late. I'm using MyMind to capture links, images, videos etc, IA Writer to write these pieces AND to capture notes and anything else that needs to be typed (I'm off the PKM train for a while), and NotePlan (alongside my pocket bullet journal) to manage tasks and time-block my days when I need that. I'm also using Timepage as my main calendar app because, while it may lack a little functionality, it is a lot prettier than all the competition and I have decided I need a little style-over-substance.

I'm slowly noodling with some ideas for both Cartoon Gravity and the Pleasant Green site for 2026, but nothing is set in stone yet. If there's anything you'd like to see or read about, leave a comment.

And I think we're done for the week.

Fuck it. Send.