I had one of those weird dreams last night, that I haven't had for a really long time, where I'm playing a new game and investigating a level, and it's like it's real, and too perfect, and actual reality. This one was a Deus Ex sequel, in which there were these blue and red owl augmentations that allowed you to fly to the top of a bridge, which even had a low poly count despite appearing in a dream (does this lower the memory requirements on your brain?).
Other people's dreams are always super interesting to them and super boring to everyone else, like thoughts and conversations. But games have a way of getting under your skin and into your subconscious like no other media. I'm always having dreams where I can double jump, and it feels like such a natural extension of my abilities, even though I haven't even single jumped in reality for at least a decade now, and if I did I would probably need months of physiotherapy afterwards.
But when I was deep in the games rabbit-hole, and even getting paid for my addiction, another theme cropped up in my dreams: I murdered someone, and I was wanted, and I had to get rid of the corpse and avoid the police. I guess that when you do kill an NPC I guess that subsconsciously you're thinking, what if that was a real person?, and those moments build up and seep into your dream state.
I do wonder if anyone else has these experiences, or if it's just me? Maybe I'm actually sleepwalking and murdering people while I'm asleep?
One thing I really dig about Foundation is its Cleon storyline, and the way that it takes place in this heightened period-drama setting. The idea of corrupt leaders in sci-fi is nothing new, and the Cleons are such great antagonists, but there are a million ways the show could have done this, and the way that it presents them as lord-of-the-manor types who live in mansions with endless manicured gardens and ponds, it feels like such a choice.
I'm sure there are other shows that have done this, but one of the greatest pleasures of Watchmen was the Ozymandias subplot, which basically consisted of English period drama stalwart Jeremy Irons alone in a manor on a moon of Jupiter, surrounded by Downton-style servants (who actually turn out to be clones, very Foundation).
It's sci-fi, but it's familiar. Shooting on location in a mansion in the UK is probably a lot cheaper than building an entire futuristic palace set, but I also wonder if this is an intentional decision by the show's creators, to entice an audience who may not usually watch hard sci-fi, to give them something that they know and love, albeit in a futuristic setting. After all, the storylines of Watchmen and Foundation, of mortality and morality, or predestination versus self-actualisation, both reflect some of the themes that run like a river throughout period drama as well.
I've always been pretty shy, especially in new situations where I don't know anyone. I become super aware of how unnecessarily tall I am. I tend to lock-up, to not know what to say. But the worst thing about all this is that it can be mistaken for cuntishness, which is annoying. I love every single person on God's green earth; I just don't know how to talk to them.
The more I think about Alien Earth, the more I dislike it. It got really good about three-quarters of the way through, and it felt like it was going somewhere interesting, but then it lost its grasp on whatever it was that made it good. It felt immature, like a kids’ show (and that was kind of the point), but it also had super gory moments and disturbing Thing-like aliens, which turned out to be a great addition because the xenomorphs have been overexposed and just aren’t scary any more.
Where it went wrong was with the ending. I hate shows that don’t have the conviction to kill off a major character by the end; the two characters who died in Alien Earth were marked for death right from the start. We watch these films because we want to see characters we love and hate die horribly. And I can usually gloss over plotholes, but there were just far too many conveniences and coincidences. Would you really let basically children loose with absurdly valuable biotech research? Give them weapons?
The only thing that did work was Morrow, who was intriguing from the word go: he seems a lot like Ash in Alien, but he’s deeply human, driven into a psychopathic state by prior events. It felt like a mature and solid way of grounding the character.
I’ve also been catching up with the first series of Foundation, which is by far the superior sci-fi series, unafraid to tackle bigger issues and respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Its time jumps and epic canvas make it hard to follow at times, but it’s nice to feel genuinely lost in a show. There have been things that haven’t worked; anything happening on Terminus feels like a videogame, but the Cleon plotline, which investigates the nature of the soul, has totally got me on board with a character you should hate, bared his soul or lack thereof. It helps that Lee Pace is just so sexy and superhuman and Christ-like. And I love the way Dornick and Seldon are gradually pulling at the threads and untying the whole thing.
Most importantly, it’s not afraid to kill its darlings, and it’s engineered in such a way that the main cast can stay in the picture while the narrative jumps centuries backwards and forwards. I cannot wait for season two.
It's the couples who don't argue in IKEA that you should worry about. The ones who wander the aisles in deathly silence.
always seemed to be on the verge of greatness. I saw them last night and they were so damn good and fun, still full of energy and it's nice to see a band where they clearly all love one another. I remember "Kandy Pop" coming out and it sounded like nothing else, it was big and brash and cartoony, irritating in just the right way, but also catchy as hell. I think that and, weirdly, "Wannabe" by Spice Girls are two songs that captured that mid-90s do whatever the hell you want vibe, songs that made you sit up and pay attention.
Bis were one of the first UK bands to really embrace and possibly pioneer that DIY aesthetic and lo-fi songwriting. Everything about them feels cheap and homemade, but that's part of the charm, the feeling that you could get closer to them than their britpop contemporaries, with their megabudget production and overdesigned artwork. They were an early "internet" band (their site, bisnation.com, dates back to 1998) who hailed from Glasgow but had Japanese-style artwork and whose most adjacent band stylistically is probably mid-to-late-90s Beastie Boys.
I'm not sure how to wrap this up, other than by saying that they were just really good. But maybe that's just because I like them.
"Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it. In a hospital in Shanghai in 1973, watching a factory worker with advanced ulcers have nine-tenths of his stomach removed under acupuncture anesthesia, I managed to follow the three-hour procedute (the first operation I'd ever observed) without queasiness, never once feeling the need to look away. In a movie theater in Paris a year later, the less gory operation in Antonioni's China documentary Chung Kuo made me flinch at the first cut of the scalpel and avert my eyes several times during the sequence. One is vulnerable to disturbing events in the form of photographic images in a way that one is not to the real thing."
There was a particularly fascinating episode of the podcast I worked on that covered a similar topic, albeit in a more contemporary way. I can't quite remember who the guy was, but he was talking about how screens take our undivided attention, they literally become our reality, no matter how small and crappy they are, our brains adjust and become immersed and everything else outside them fades away into obliteration, and it takes a lot of time (I want to say half an hour) for our brains to adjust back to reality. And we're doing this to ourselves day-in-day-out, constantly switching our perceptions. I need to find that damn episode!
Finally, a question: what the fuck is acupuncture anesthesia? How is that even a thing?
Obviously not saying things in reality aren't disturbing. In an average lifetime you'll see a lot of stuff that's really, really disturbing. I guess it's just a different kind of disturbing to a photograph.
One thing from Susan Sontag's On Photography that really stuck with me is the idea that a photograph can provoke a more visceral reaction than seeing the same thing in reality. I'll dig out the exact quote later, but she mentions that she was deeply disturbed by autopsy photos, but that seeing an actual dismembered dead body in a real life morgue provoked no feelings whatsoever. It was just there, just another thing you see during your day, like a bus or a cloud.
It feels particularly relevant today when most of us probably spend more time looking at photos or computer-generated, heightened versions of reality than we do witnessing stuff in the real world. We look at pleasurable things on our screens, attractive people, cute animals, sexual content, which makes the occasions when we are hit with something horrific all the more disturbing, and this is exactly how horror movies work.
But those same screens are the ones where we get stressful work emails, where we watch videos of traumatic and dramatic events and get prophecies of doom in the news. And yet we keep going back. No wonder everyone seems to be having a nervous breakdown, it's like climbing up a building to enjoy the view and then jumping off over and over again.
This is a bit of a rambling post, and there's a lot more to this, but I think it's just really good to touch base with reality every now and then and realise just how completely fucking boring everything is.
is really easy, isn’t it? Most of our media, our songs, our films, our books, our games, are just big long moans about something, for better or worse. Being miserable is funnier than being incontrovertibly happy. Pratfalls make us feel better about our own shit.
I’m not sure what my point is, oh yes, my point is that moaning is what you do when you don’t have anything to say. My last two posts have just been complaints, basically, when I could have been writing about something that’s interesting to me and maybe one other person on God’s green Earth. But at least that’s something interesting, hopefully, and it makes me feel better about myself and my life. It feels like progress.
So from now on I’m only going to write about things, rather than myself. Apart from today, when I’m writing about myself.
is such a fucker. I completely and totally forgot what an emotional rollercoaster freelance writing is. When you get a commission and start writing, you feel strident and confident, but then you send it off and, if you don’t hear anything, those doubt floodgates open up and you’re back to square one, uncertain and fearful, groping in the darkness for any kind of positive nubbin you can grab and hold on to for dear life. And then you get the next commission and feel positive again, put everything you can into it, feel good, and then you get that oh-so-empty silence and that all-encompassing vacuum opens up again, and oh Jesus Christ, your entire life is in the hands of a commissioning editor who has a billion things on their plate.
But I have to keep reminding myself that I prefer it this way. I love it. Living dangerously. You’re only as good as your last assignment. The alternative is that I just sit around lazily and do the absolute bare minimum. At least this way I feel like I’m alive.
I have no idea, seriously. I left my job last year because it was making me unhappy, and I had this aim of becoming a YouTuber/writer type multitasker person, but it turns out it's actually really hard. And it's not just that it's hard, it's that it's hard every single day, and you have to keep that energy up, and I'm not young and everything just makes me so damn tired now. So I'm kind of stuck. I've done bits of writing and really enjoyed them, and got paid for them, but it's a fraction of what I was getting last year. I've always told myself never to worry about money, but now I'm worried about money. But I need to project myself as a person who isn't worried about money. I feel like the ground has disappeared beneath my feet. I'm happier than I've ever been, and I feel confidence that I've never had before, and I need to remember that I've done so much and had so many successes and surprised myself with my capabilities, and that I can go so much further. But I need money.
really grew on me. It was a very familiar world, and the moment I saw the Sec Unit and heard his gripes about humans I knew how it was going to play out (hmmm, I wonder if he'll end up saving their lives and gaining their trust?). But it got genuinely exciting about three-quarters of the way through the series, I appreciated its half-hour runtime, it looked great, and Noma Dumezweni basically acted everyone else off the screen.
I do wonder about that final episode though. It felt so tacked-on and unnecessary, and my theory is that it was shot at the same time as the first episode, when they had the set built and the showrunners (the Weitz bros) available to direct. But it felt weird because Murderbot wasn't really the same character he was in episode nine; yes, he'd had his memory wiped, but he was still the kind of blank sheet he was at the beginning of the show.
I liked it a lot. It didn't feel like it was a three-hour (ish) movie, and I do really like the way that it's another Dicaprio modern western where he doesn't do a huge amount and takes a back seat and lets other (female, BIPOC) characters take centre stage. He's using his name as a trademark, a seal of quality, a way to get a Paul Thomas Anderson movie a $175m budget and a $120m box office..
BUT the only thing I wasn't sure about was its politics. Like other Paul Thomas Anderson movies, this is very much about characters who live in grey areas of morality, but it's also probably Anderson's most heightened and black-and-white world. But in making DiCaprio a cuck to the film's events, it lessens its impact. And then Teyana Taylor is such a catalyst character and she doesn't seem to have any kind of motivation for doing what she does, other than the fact that every single thing seems to turn her on, which mollifies her political agenda. They're great characters, yes, but they come across as antifa cosplayers.
One Battle After Another does double-down on its ideas as the film goes on: Benicio del Toro actually has a really fucking moral and genuine agenda, and Chase Infiniti's utterly traumatic experience gives her some really fucking good reasons to hate Sean Penn. It's only here that the film finds characters who go beyond caricature, and you start to give a shit.
It's still a great film and I really loved it, there were moments where I was biting my nails and I've never bitten my nails before in my life. But it also feels like of a compromise for Paul Thomas Anderson; he needs to find some common ground between his trademark eccentrics and this very gritty, real world.
There's a spider in my garden and I've grown to love it. It's a fat mini-tarantula variety garden spider who always makes these enormous webs. The other day it made one right across my path and I obliviously walked straight into it, and then apologised to the spider.
The next day, the spider had made another huge web, and they're such intricate and amazing constructions, with such an incredible level of engineering. I showed Sam and we put some small leaves in the web. The spider quickly extricated the leaves from the web. I could just tell it was slightly irked, so I tried to feed it a little bit flapjack, but this was similarly excised from the web. I figured the spider would just think of the oaty crumb as food, but it correctly identified it as non-insectoidal and rejected it. So weirdly clever.
But things came to a head with this spider a couple of days ago. I had to put the bins out, and to get them past the spider's latest silky net, I would have to take it down. So I bargained with the spider: I located a deceased wasp and gingerly placed it in the web. The spider accepted my gift and started devouring the insect. I waited for an hour or for it to fully consume and digest its meal, and then I carefully removed the web's supporting strands and it gently collapsed to the ground.
Today, I went back out into the garden and I was slightly shocked to see that my little arachnid friend has constructed another web across the garden. I would have to get past it to access the shed, and just as I was preparing to find another deceased insect, I realised that the spider had constructed its latest big trap in such a way to allow my safe passage into the further regions of the garden.
I should probably get a job.
When I was a kid, there was a forest near where we lived, and it was always amazing. Me and my friends would go there and build dens and dams and treehouses and have adventures and explore caves.
A couple of years ago I returned to this woodland and it had completely changed. Every single tree had been cut down. It felt sparse and apocalyptic.I felt like all those childhood memories had been mercilessly hacked down along with the trees.
Which leads me to The Thin Red Line
When me and my mates weren’t dicking about in the woods, we’d go to the cinema to see movies. I was in my teens when The Thin Red Line came out (did i mention that i’m really old), and I’d never seen any other movie that spoke to me in quite the same way. Here, in incredible 35mm, was a stunning vision of man’s relationship with nature. It reflected the natural world I knew and explored. It was the polar opposite to Saving Private Ryan, and pretty much every other movie of that era.
The Thin Red Line is about what happens when we lose the things we love: our friends, our lovers, our places, and, ultimately, ourselves.
I think this is why it appealed to me so much. As a teenager, you’re in this weird space between childhood and adulthood, you’re aware that things are going to change dramatically, that I’d have to follow my friends to the city and go to university.
And so, when I eventually went to university, The Thin Red Line held a special place in my heart. If anyone asked me what my favourite movie was, I would proudly say, The Thin Red Line. And people would generally agree.
I avoided the film for decades, because I felt like watching it on TV couldn’t do justice to John Toll’s crisp, filterless, naturally lit cinematography. But, last year, Thin Red Line was shown at a local cinema as part of a season of films about nature, and I thought, great, this is a chance to see it on the big screen again, as intended.
And it was like going back to that beloved woodland from my childhood. It looked kind of the same, but there was also this gradual realisation of: does this movie really fucking suck?
I just suddenly saw it in a new light. It’s widely known that Mallick shot a lot of footage for The Thin Red Line, over five hours, and that whole characters were chopped out and left on the cutting-room floor — and it kind of shows. There are lines of dialogue that just don’t seem to make much sense. There are some utterly perfunctory conversations between characters. There doesn’t seem to be any narrative through-hread.
At the time, I thought that this was a way of commenting on the nature of war, and how people fade in and out of existence or something, but now I’m just like, is this just bad filmmaking?
And so I felt kind of disappointed with the movie, and in myself. Have I wasted my life holding this thing up on a pedestal when it’s just pedestrian? Was I stupid to tell people it was the greatest movie of all time? And then it kind of dawned on me; that it was a good thing that I didn’t like the movie.
I understood why the movie didn’t work, because it didn’t fit in with the conventions of movie-making, the ones that make a movie compelling and interesting. I ealso understood what did work: the cinematography, the music, the performances, the texture. Yeah, I just said “texture.” These are things that impress a teenage boy but not necessarily a middle-aged man.
So now, when someone asks me what my favourite movie is, I say that I don’t really have a favourite movie. I don’t have a favourite colour because I’m not eight. I just have movies that I’m obsessed with. For a little while it was Michael Clayton, at the moment it’s Gone Girl, and it’s been Synecdoche, New York.
These movies have so much going on, so much you can read into them and take apart and analyse, which I don’t think you can do with a movie as weirdly distorted as The Thin Red Line.
And I don’t want to say The Thin Red Line is a bad film at all, even though i totally said that earlier. It still makes me cry.
There is something going on here, something I want to say almost spiritual, that I can’t quite put my finger on, that works really well. I just see the flaws in it now. I understand why people might not like it.
I went back to that forest again recently and trees have been replanted there, and thick gorse has grown where there were once woods.
It’s not the same, but it’s a new and different place.
And I think that’s life isn’t it?
You change, the people around you grow up, the things you like shift, the world you live in is reshaped, but they’re not necessarily bad things. They’re just things. Thin red things.
It's absolutely no secret that AppleTV is promoting Apple products. It's inevitable really. It makes sense that if Apple is making the products you love to use every day, it also makes the content you love to watch on said products (even if I do watch AppleTV on my Android phone occasionally). And it's no secret that AppleTV shows are full of product placement, as this Wall Street Journal video suggests. But I feel like this might apply to other Apple series and movies as well.
Take Blitz, for example, which I saw like a year ago (a year is not a long time now). In that movie, Saoirse Ronan's child goes missing while he's evacuated from London, which is obviously a complete nightmare for parents. I get worried if my son is in a different part of the house. The movie is set during WWII, so how does it tie into present-day Apple products some 80 years later?
I'm sure I'm not the only person and parent who sat through that movie thinking, IF ONLY SHE HAD SOME WAY TO TRACK HIM. And, of course, the answer is right there in an Apple AirTag. They don't exist in the fictional version of the film, but they do exist right here in reality, and they're amazing for tracking your kids/objects.
I'm sure there's something similar happening in Severance. As the Wall Street Journal commented, characters with Android phones usually turn out to be evil in Apple shows, but Severance takes it a step further. In that show's "innie" world, technology has seemingly stood still with dot matrix printers and chunky beige terminals. While this reflects the status of the world of Lumon Industries as somewhere cut off from reality, it also reinforces the idea that new Apple products are superior and not sinister: IRL, everyone uses an iPhone.
It continues with Murderbot. At first glance, this sci-fi comedy (which isn't as funny as it thinks it is) seems to suggest that technology is a mixed bag: its titular protagonist, played by Alexander Skarsgard, is a robot that hacks its own control chip and then binge-watches 1,000-episode TV shows. On the surface, that seems to be a critique of technology, but when you realise that Murderbot gains freedom and personality by hacking himself it could be seen as suggesting that technology is a vehicle for personal expression and independence.
Of cource, this might not apply to all AppleTV shows; unlike Murderbot I can't rapidly gulp them all down in one go (more's the pity). And this probably doesn't apply to all shows. But I still think there's got to be something going on under the surface here, some kind of surreptitious and deeply Appley way of getting you to invest in its ecosystem.
I've been called a twat quite a lot of times in my life, and like so many things that seemed so hurtful at the time, they now actually seem quite funny. Twat itself is a funny word, it's kind of playful and childish, like a portmanteau of twit and prat, but its meaning makes it quite a harsh swear in the swear hierachy.
But being a twat is kind of reassuring, because it means, I'd like to think, that you're not stupid. You're a twat. You twat. An idiot doesn't do things intentionally, they are just an idiot. But a twat does idiotic things intentionally, or misguidedly. Calling someone a twat is an armour-piercing bullet intended to help them change their thoughts or actions, and kind of helpful.
You twat.
This started life as a YouTube video that I thought was good while I was making it, but the more times I watch it, the more it descends so hard into pure cringe that I cry tears of, I don’t know, is there a humour associated with cringe, like bile? Crile? So I’ve decided to write it as a post here instead.
I’ve been trying to write a screenplay. Like just about everyone else at the moment, it seems. I’m not going to pretend I’m a professional screenwriter, but I find writing fun and enjoyable. I think the screenplay is pretty good, although I fell into the familiar trap of writing myself into a corner and trying to write myself out of it, only to write myself into more corners until I was stuck in a writing octagon.
And at that point it’s hard to know if your screenplay is good or absolutely nonsensical. You get so tired of looking at the damn thing, of rereading it, that you get lost in the weeds and you can’t see the wood for the trees and all the trees are just big weeds anyway. So you need someone outside to help you make sense of it all, to at least just tell you it’s OK and you should keep going and you’re not an abject failure. And that’s where services such as CoverFlyX and The BlckLst come in handy.
They both work a bit differently: CoverFlyX is basically a script exchange site, where you earn tokens by reading other scripts, and then spend them getting someone to read your script. The BlackLst (I forget which vowels are missing here) just invites you to pay upfront (something like $100) and then gets a professional to read your screenplay and — potentially — get your it onto The Black List, the annual list of the best screenplays in the world. Obviously the chances of this happening are billions to one, but it’s a pretty tempting carrot for the $100 stick.
While CoverFlyX and ThBlckLst can be useful, they're not perfect. CoverFlyX gave me detailed feedback on my feature-length screenplay in less than 23 minutes, so yes that reviewer used AI. And TBL’s feedback was relatively unhelpful and ill-informed: it said it would need a huge VFX budget, even though I knew it could be done for very little. It was super frustrating, and I really couldn’t afford the extra $100 for another opinion.
I figured that AI could be a good use case for this. LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini have been trained on huge amounts of written material, including screenplays, so they should know what makes good ones good and bad ones bad. I took a deep breath, uploaded my script to Gemini. And it said it was good and I was happy. But it also said that if I changed a few things then it would be even better. So I rewrote it from scratch, which took a really long time, then re-uploaded it, and guess what? It just said the same thing again. It’s good, well done, but it could be better. It was super frustrating.
So I decided to run a little experiment. I grabbed a bunch of screenplays and ran them through Gemini. These included the Oscar-winning movies Conclave and Anora, as well as the deeply non-Oscar winning movies Catwoman and The Room, and, finally, Citizen Kane. And it basically just said the same thing over and over again: these screenplays are good, but they could be better. I asked for a score for each screenplay, and it gave them all seven-and-a-half out of 10.
No one sets out to write a bad screenplay, or make a bad movie. Tommy Wiseau had his heart in the right place when he made The Room — he just didn’t know how to make a film. And there are flashes of the movie Catwoman could have been; a satire on the plastic surgery and cosmetics industries with a chemically powered Dorian Grey-style plot very similar to The Substance. I guess there’s a chance that these movies do have at least the semblance of a good screenplay, they’re just not good films. Separated from cultural context (I removed telling character names from the screenplays) maybe these screenplays are all the same?
But what I think is really going on here is this: Gemini is designed to make you feel good. It’s compiling information from internet forums and giving you shit sandwiches (compliment, criticism, compliment) without actually understanding what it means. So of course it’s going to say your script is good, even if it’s bad, because it’s what everyone who is a decent person says on the internet. It’s suspiciously eager to please, maybe programmed to avoid offense, in such a way that it fails to be useful or trustworthy. Of course it’s going to tell you what it thinks you want to hear — because if it makes you feel good about yourself, you’re more likely to take out a subscription.
There are a tonne of other uses for AI. I use Gemini for recipes all the time and they always turn out great. And for advice on how to fix my bike, or solve particular software problems, it’s awesome. It just seems like it sucks for any kind of criticism.
Yesterday, Sam (11) was telling me about an experience day he went on at Bristol's Create Centre. Designed to simulate the kinds of tough dilemmas he might find himself in as a teenager, it apparently included a mock-up Co-Op, a road with a car, a fire, and lots more. Each of these had a right answer: at 30 mph, the car would hit you in a particular place on the road, for example.
He told me about one in particular scenario in which a man told him to carry a case. But apparently he found out the case was full of drugs. The man said that if Sam told the police the case was full of drugs, then the man would hurt him. And that was it, or this was all that Sam remembered. There is basically no way out of this situation, is there? If you tell the police, the man will hurt you. If you carry on, you're transporting drugs. I'm just not sure what the lesson is here.
Yesterday, I finally completed the 1,001 albums project; a website that feeds you one great album from Robert Dimery's "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" every day. It's been a hell of a mission! Over the past few years I've listened to one of 1,089 albums (it includes albums from different editions of the book) every day. Sometimes they've been less than good, I probably should have paid more atteention to others, but most of the time there's been something that's hooked me or surprised me. I love music generally and it's been really cool to fill in those blanks and get a really firm grasp on an artists' output.
I'm just not sure what to do now? I guess I have to go back to listening to weird modern music?
I always write this shit and then come to a conclusion later. This one’s conclusion is that wild camping has opened up the world to me (within reason!); with my very minimal AliExpress setup I can go just about anywhere and probably get just about enough sleep. I’m going to try and do LEJOG before the year is out, hopefully. I’ll see what happens.
I also thought of a really good joke for this, but I've completely forgotten it. Damn internet is mushing my brain.
I spent Saturday night under the stars. This is a bucket-list thing from a bucket list that only comes out when I want to do something I wouldn't usually do. It's a fully recommended thing to do.
It was also probably the worst and the best night's sleep I've ever had. Worst because I was wet and deeply uncomfortable; my sleeping mat and my pillow and my bivvy bag seemed to repel one another, causing me to slip and slide all over the place and wake up in all sorts of weird positions. My head was too high, or not high enough, and never just right. Rolling onto my side basically rotated the entire world for me.
But it was also amazing. As I nodded off, I saw the flies I was so worried about gathering over my nice warm blood-filled head, but a fleet of hungry bats soon allied with me, swooping and darted over my head, devouring my would-be assailants. At some point I woke up in the night with the Plough's handle directly in front of me. I always love staring at stars because it makes you feel so insignificant and small on the grand scheme of things. I thought about how, for about 100,000 years, humans would have probably spent a great deal of time just gazing at stars and trees, how we're probably hardwired to feel at peace when we see these things. I'm wondering if I should start making ASMR-style videos of these?
Despite my incredibly uncomfortable night, I woke as the sun came up. I felt at once like I needed more sleep and that I could go and climb a mountain. I'd like to think that the greenery that surrounded me gave me a steady supply of fresh oxygen, and that I wasn't subjected to the stuffy build-up of CO2 that you get in a tent. I felt alert for the rest of the day.
And the things I worried about most turned out to be not that worrying at all. I think I might have one insect bite on my chest. There was a sole slug on my camping mat in the morning, and tough caterpillar lurking under my sleeping bag, but all the other little bugs ignored me. I also wasn't cold at all - the bivvy bag trapped heat and kept me at just the right temperature.
It was a nice little experiment, and I thknk I could do it again.
I'm currently reading Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, which is 50% the best thing I've read since Infinite Jest and 50% AITA bait. The chapter I'm on at the moment is about identity politics and the rejection thereof, and it's really hit home with me. Like I was saying about cyclists, I never really identified as a cyclist, but rather a person who cycles. In my previous life as a games journalist, I never wanted to be a gamer, more a person who enjoyed videogames. There's a difference, right? In that you don't let your identity become your personality. This is not a slight towards cyclists at all, and to all intents and purposes I am a cyclist when I'm on a bike. And I've been a vociferous defender of my right to ride a bike, both online and IRL.
I guess my point is that whenever I've had problems as a cyclist, it's because I've been lumped into that category by someone else. To quote a literal real driver*: "You cyclists are all the same!"
This is probably a point that's been made a million times, and one that I'm spewing out, partially digested and completely misinterpreted, from Tony Tulathimutte, but setting up cultural divisions doesn't help anyone in particular other than the all-consuming utterly toxic factory of capitalism, which feeds on these negative emotions, grows on the idea that the only way we can confirm we exist is by buying shit online.
I knew I wanted to ride on Saturday (May 31), I just wasn't sure where or how far or what to do. But, exactly like Herod in the Bible, an answer appeared with a fanfare of whalesong; muscular and drenched in olive oil (I've never read the bible). RidewithGPS had sent me an email invitation to take part in The Cutty Cap Challenge, a GPS-powered treasure hunt around Bristol. I'd heard of it before, but wrote it off as part of the cycling culture that I'd kept at arm's length, not because I hate it, but because it made me feel old, and I guess happy socialable people make me feel a little bit uncomfortable, because I always feel like such a fucking outsider in those siutations, even though I know deep down that those people are probably dealing with the exact same problems I have.
Wow, that blew up a bit, right?
Anyway, it was a nice day, and I thought fuck it, let's go. The event started at 8 AM, but I managed to get out the door at about 8:30 and made my way to the first cap, in Perretts Park, a vertiginous open space in South Bristol with a zig-zag path whose traversal is rewarded with commanding views of the city. God, I sound like an estate agent.
I poked around a little bit and found my first hat! And also my last hat. From here, I cycled to all the other locations, a bit of a random wander across central Bristol. I found a couple of new places: Royate Hill, and its viaduct, which I'd seen many times but always figured was part of the Bristol-Bath path. There's also the slightly apocalyptic Narroways Millennium Green, a deep gorge in the St Werburgh's area, which has all the hallmarks of an old quarry. I think I may have seen Banksy in Stokes Croft (a middle-aged man in Bristol with spray paint must be Banksy). I saw a young girl carrying a bundle of fluff through Montpelier; a puppy or a kitten, getting coos and smiles from passers-by. A man proposed to his girlfriend near the Clifton Suspension Bridge and she threw herself off. Just kidding. She cried. I wanted to take a photo of some goats near the Downs and a man followed me, which was a little sketchy, but I think he was just being very friendly.
After I'd failed to find the last cap (I think someone may have taken more than one), I went to a nearby cafe and bumped into one of Sam's friends and his parents, and joined them for a cup of coffee and a chat.
I was happy. It was a fun thing to do. It was quiet and just warm enough in Bristol. People were happy. It reminded me why I like living in a city. Just stuff happening that's usually nice.
I feel like I need a point, but I guess it's that doing random, spur-of-the-moment things often leads to great joy for me, maybe because I haven't spent lots of time fretting about it. Maybe planning ahead is actually really bad for mental health? But the world demands order and spreadsheets and shared Google Calendar events for your every breath.
So yeah, those drugs I'm currently on, vortioxetine, I'm not sure how much they're helping. I feel a bit like they're making me drunk. I pop one in the morning and feel strangely great; these little pulses of nervous energy coming from deep in my stomach. But I also feel tired and groggy. And I start doing things, like these big things, like I make YouTube videos and I apply for roles as extras etc. And I don't worry about stuff so much, like I don't dwell on those little shitty details that fuck up your day.
But then I do. In the middle of the night I feel that intense hangxiety, feeling like such a fucking complete and total loser and hating myself and can't stop thinking about how great it would be to just get out of here completely and totally. And then I wake up the next day, pop the pill, and feel better, and get through the next day.
I get triggered so easily. I saw someone I used to work with in the pub the other day, and I think they surreptitiously took a photo of me. I don't know if they did or not. But it reopened a deep wound that I thought was healing. It's just always there, that black dog of failure. It just triggered all those memories of those mistakes I made, the way I was outcast from a job I loved, the way people I thought of as friends suddenly fell silent, and the people who weren't my friends who openly laughed at me in the street when they saw I'd had a kid (seriously, who the fuck does that?).
The drugs were helping but they're not any more. I just think about it all the time. And it's just become so fucking boring. The stress of the whole thing. The way that I think, oh yeah, that person still seemed to like me, but if I see them I feel so stressed and shy that I don't want to talk to them.
These are all my own failings. CBT helped a bit and then it didn't. The drugs are helping a little but now they're not. Exercise only goes so far. The only thing that's really keeping me going is my son, but I feel like he's probably going to hate me too in a couple of years.
Hope springs eternal until it doesn't.
May 01, 2025 - 10:50AM
I made a thing on YouTube. This was a big thing for me. Not only did it take forever, it's also the first time I've shown my face on a YouTube video. And I hate it. My face. I've always thought I'm like a six or a seven, but God, I'm probably not. My face is an overly fleshy meatbag sourced from the ugliest denizens of the four corners of the British Isles. And it turns out a good four inches of my 6' 4" height is nothing but pure forehead.
But it's fine. It feels like the YouTube audience cares less about what you look like and more about what you have to say. I could be fatally wrong on this, but hey ho.
What I had to say was this: I tried uploading various screenplays to AI chatbots to see what they thought of them; to see if they could distinguish good and bad screenplays. And it turns out they can't! At the moment. Admittedly, it wasn't a fair test, but it was an interesting one. I feel like it's probably worth another post unto itself, but I just want to make a quick list of things I've learned about making YouTube videos so I can remember for next time.
This 13-minute video took about six weeks of researching, planning, filming, recording, and editing. Including a "presenter" just adds so much work. I tried to light with a blend of natural and artifical sources, but it still looked like shit. I would record whole sections and then discard them when I realised that the framing or lighting wasn't quite right.
I managed to break my favourite pancake zoom lens, so I ended up using a prime lens, which gives really nice depth-of-field but also adds a slight flatness. I thought I'd found the perfect focus setting, but then realised the background was subtley bouncing in and out of focus.
Background noise and echo are never fun to deal with. But I think I nailed the settings for my voice recorder; essentially I turned most features off.
I tried to get that nice natural low-light look, but I just ended up adjusting my skin tones to various shades of orange. I think next time I'll overexpose the video a little so I've got more bandwidth to play with.
Well, duh. When I watch the video back I cringe at how shitty and amateur it is. There are a thousand things I could cut, and a thousand things I could add.
But the real question here is, how much does it matter? I'm Gen-X/Millennial (depending on who you ask) with a media studies degree, so I naturally think that any recorded media should be of cinematic, or at least BBC-level quality. But people will be watching this* on their phones, on their watches; they probably won't give a crap.
And despite how bloody difficult this whole process is, I adore it. I feel so at home in Premiere Pro, maybe because it's not Chrome and I'm not opening a new tab of endorphin delight every 30 seconds. I love that there are a billion little problems to solve, a billion tweaks you can make to get it better. I'd happily do this for the rest of my life, and that's the aim. I just need to get faster and better and more confident, and making and posting this video - no matter how cringey and terrible it is - has been an enormous step in that direction.
*Not that anyone has watched this
They say running is good for your mental health, but I wonder if it's a bit too good. Yesterday, I went for a fairly intense but disappointingly slow run around Victoria Park in Bristol and followed it up with a trip to Lidl.
I thought I had this particular route planned out down to a T; I leave at 8:30ish so I arrive at Lidl just in time to get a discounted veg box. But yesterday it all went wrong: I misjudged the distance I'd cover on the run, and ended up doing depressing laps around the Lidl car park. I figured that if anyone asked, I could just say I'd forgotten where I parked, even though I don't have a car, and the car park is tiny, and why would anyone wear running kit when they're trying to find their car. No one asked, thankfully.
By the time I got to Lidl, I felt kind of annoyed with myself. I couldn't see any veg boxes in the window, so it seemed like a wasted trip. We needed bananas though. This is my life now.
As I was walking to the entrance - sweaty, heart rate returning to normal - I saw a guy ahead of me supping an energy drink. And he just put the can down near the entrance, within metres of a bin. Heart rate increased again. I almost said, "there's a bin just there," like some horrific boomer, but held myself back.
I go and get the bananas. I do that typical British thing of reaching the tills at the same time as another customer, a mum who was deeply engaged in an AirPod conversation, and who I think didn't even see me, or she did see me and chose to ignore this enormous sweaty man with his heavy breathing.
She had loads of shopping, I had a bunch of bananas. In Lidl, it's generally the done thing to let the person with the least amount of shopping go in front of you. As she uploaded her haul onto the conveyor I became increasingly irritated, but just accepted it.
She started talking to me. I didn't catch what she said at first, but then it was, "Would you like to go in front of me?" In a typically British way, I accepted with an "Are you sure?" caveat, and then thanked her profusely. She also let the lady behind me go in front.
Then I saw the veg boxes, tucked away. I claimed my treasure trove of slightly rotten asparagus and cabbage and potatoes (always potatoes).
Finally, I left the store and saw that the energy drink man's can was gone. I assume he left it outside so he didn't have to lug it around the store.
~
Your (well, my) first reaction is always the worst, and it seems that the adrenaline rush of a run heightens this phenomenon. It reminded me to reread David Foster Wallace's This is Water, which has become my creed, even though it's not really a creed at all.
"A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer."
― Jane Austen, Emma
“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”
― Gustave Flaubert
Last week, I finished Johan Hari's hugely enlightening Chasing the Scream, which documents the catastrophic effects of America's war on drugs. Hari is a far better writer than I'll ever be. He got into trouble earlier in his career for just making shit up (including, hilariously, writing that the Japanese Prime Minister was attacked by a factory robot), but I don't mind if there's a touch of bullshit in his writing because it's so damn entertaining. I also love his use of tildes to separate his intros and outros.
~
Chasing the Scream got me thinking about drugs. I've had my share of substances. I still count the whole year I spent at university smoking weed and watching movies as probably the best of my life; my grades went up because I was able to completely detach myself from the movies I was studying. But there was, of course, a downside: the paranoia, the laziness, the expense, the fact that I was doing something illegal.
Then I traded a cigarette for an ecstasy tablet in a club in Cheltenham and had probably the single best experience of my life; I was happy, unusually talkative, I was in love with everyone, streetlights became mini-discotheques. But then I came crashing down. I found it increasingly hard to find pleasure, so I would drink myself into oblivion and get kicked out of clubs and generally act like a complete fucking dickhead.
I'd go on to have dalliances with pills and MDMA powder, and each time the effects would be a little less, and I'd feel less euphoric until I reached a methylenedioxymethamphetamine event horizon, and the negatives outweighed the positives. I'm sure that my use of MDMA has been a factor in the past 10 years; the worst and longest depressive episode I've ever had.
Other drugs never really took hold. A couple of lines of coke made me into a complete fucking dickhead, so I've always avoided it. Mushrooms made everything hilarious, and I would have used them more often if they hadn't been outlawed. I always told myself I'd try acid if I turned 60 and still had all my marbles, but I feel like I barely have enough marbles for a two-marble game of marbles.
The single best drug experience I ever had was with a batch of cheap weed. It was strangely textured and full of seeds, but it made me feel a sense of elevated happiness without the overwhelming paranoia of skunk. I think my stoner mates hated it because it was weak, but, for me, it was just right. Unfortunately, I never found anything like it again.
This unusually mild weed was the exception to the high-THC rule. Johan Hari suggests that the rise in strong weed is down to its illegal status in the UK: growers and dealers would rather handle a small amount of powerful cannabis than a large amount of weak weed; it's the difference between smuggling whisky or beer. And so the strength of weed has increased steadily.
I can't help but wonder if this has had a knock-on effect on politics. There's a small percentage of men who carry on smoking weed when they're middle-aged and this seems to cause issues; the strength makes them paranoid and unable to maintain relationships, so they descend into catastrophically isolated thought patterns.
Like I said, I'm sure weed made me a little bit smarter, but it can go both ways; when you're stoned, you can think deeply on subjects, but if those thoughts aren't verified or discussed they can grow, and before you know it, you believe that climate change is a myth or that 15-minute-cities have been designed by a secret cabal of racoon people. And then you tap this into Facebook and it gets propagated by other stoners, and then it becomes part of the wider political discourse. There's obviously a lot more to it than this, but I'm sure it's a small but important part of the picture. If weed was legal, this might be less of a problem.
~
I haven't taken anything other than a moderate amount of alcohol since I hit my 40s. I grew out of drugs and started enjoying cycling more; if I'm tempted to have an evening beer I always say to myself that I'd rather have a bike ride than a hangover tomorrow morning. But if I could find that super-mild weed I would smoke it. And it would probably be horrible.
Hoping this won't happen for a while, but here it is:
I will probably add/remove stuff to this as and when I can. I'm not sure about "Journey to the Line" because it's a bit too, y'know, movie. Maybe I'll switch it for something by Fauré or Pärt, but then those are a bit pretentious and diacritical, but then even using the word "diacritical" is pretentious in itself.
Death is obviously the most horrible thing, but I have a couple of thoughts that help me stop worrying about it so much. The first is bastardised from John Gray; he concluded one of his books by saying that the overall purpose of human life is to see. And what we see in our lifetimes is insane. We can literally look up and see galaxies, or oak trees that are older than we can ever imagine, or look through a fairly basic microscope and see tiny creatures that can survive the harshest conditions on this planet and elsewhere.
But the remarkable thing is that we can understand what these things are. A few hundred years ago, doctors believed that maggots in rotting flesh came from the flesh itself. That you could transform lead into gold. That an invisible all-seeing man was watching our every move and secretly directing our passage through life. But now, humanity, as a whole, has never been more enlightened, and it's totally remarkable when you think about it. Just look around you now: there's evidence of progress and knowledge in literally every single thing.
We're also part of the universe. That galaxy, that gas giant planet, that puddle, we're all made of the same fundamental matter, and that's just really neat. When we die, we don't really stop existing, all our matter is broken down, and the atoms that we're comprised of return to this absolutely vast cosmos. The fact that we exist at all, and that we're equal, and we're all made of the same stuff, is more amazing than thinking we were made by God or whoever.
The next part of this is that if a universe can exist once, it can exist again. It might take an unimaginable number of trillennia, but, in theory, your exact atomic makeup, and that of a cup or a lobster or a comet, can exist again at some point in an infinite future. This might be a fantastical way of dealing with the existential anxiety of death, but it helps me just a little bit.
Anyway, I'd like "Extreme Ways" to be played as the casket is lowered so it makes my life feel like a Bourne film.
Just a quick explainer on the awful dad jokes at the bottom of this page. I really, really got into Rob Manuel's Fesshole and Anon Opin Twitter accounts. I would post a lot of stuff, 80% of which was completely made up, but a lot of it got picked up by poor Rob and his enormous spreadsheet and reposted. And I was quite proud of quite a lot of my bollocks.
I wanted a way to record my nonsense so, at some point, I could say, "hey look, I wrote that." thoughts.page seemed like the perfect place, but somewhere I got a bit lost and just started attempting to write jokes here instead. And now I'm using it to post thoughts and feelings.
There was a point to this post, but I can't rememeber what it was. Ah yes, so, in a way, I'm still using it to post my confessions. In a way all stories are confessions *. But these posts are true. Honesty is the best policy.
Yesterday it was an aggressive DPD driver.
I can't remember where I learned about it, but every day I wake up and think, who's going to be my Dickhead, capital D, today?
Is this a healthy way of thinking? Maybe not. But it can be helpful. Because when you inevitably meet your Daily Dickhead, someone who annoys you or doesn't think about they're making you feel, you can say to yourself "That's just my Daily Dickhead." The person who didn't hold open the door for you. The shop worker who was rude. Then you can move on with your life, safe in the knowledge that the all-seeing Lord of Dickheads has given you your daily dose of Dickheadedness.
Your Daily Dickhead could be anyone. Your partner, your parent, your progeny. Your boss. Your best friend. A random guy on the street. It's usually a man. And they're only your Dickhead that day; it resets at midnight and a whole new Dickhead is assigned to randomly surprise you with a surprising Dick Move™.
It goes both ways though, because you can be someone's Daily Dickhead, sometimes without even realising it. The person you forgot to wave at when they gave way to you. The aunt you omitted from your Christmas card list. But, as long as they're subscribed to The Cult of the Daily Dickhead, they can move on with their life as well. And everything's fine, because we can all be Dickheads, can't we?
It turns out I've been lying quite a lot lately. I've been telling Sam (my 11-year-old son) how studious and focussed I was at school, in the hopes that it'll help him knuckle down a bit. This is absolute fucking nonsense though. I'm currently at my parents' house, and looking through my old school books, so many pages are marked in teacher's handwriting, blood-red ink: "Why isn't this finished, Henry?" or "Where's the rest of it?"
~
I was diagnosed with ADHD in late 2021. My ADHD isn't the bouncing-off-the-walls energy of some kids; instead, it's the more morose and introspective ADHD, which makes me prone to long periods of inattention, of staring out of windows and tumbling deep into imagined worlds -- and not finishing work.
At first, my diagnosis came as a bit of a shock, but it was ultimately a good thing; it let me off the hook. I knew I wasn't quite like everyone else. People would say I was boring, but it felt like my brain was going at lightspeed all the time, and my physical being was clumsily picking up the pieces. This is very hard to describe.
I - obviously - leapt at the chance to try a magic ADHD drug: Elvanse. The most common drugs for ADHD are stimulants, essentially the same amphetamines used recreationally, but in lower doses and with time-release elements to prevent major side effects. And they were brilliant.
For the first time, I felt like a normal person going about my day-to-day life. I would find myself casually chatting to people and not wanting to ejector seat out of the conversation as soon as possible. I could play football. I could concentrate. Just the sensation of getting those keys clacking on a keyboard felt euphoric.
For a little while, it felt like the exact solution I'd been looking for. But my brain soon adjusted to the dosage, and the NHS ramped up my milligrams maybe just a little bit too soon, and I started getting side effects.
I've always been so bad at sleeping. Some people just seem to have a knack for sleeping, but I've had chronic insomnia since my teen years, set off by all sorts of weird little things: a drop of caffeine after midday, a minor argument at work or home, looking at screens too late in the day. Elvanse took this sensitivity and ramped it up to an extreme new level. Three hours became a good night's sleep, and even then, it didn't feel like real sleep. I didn't wake up feeling refreshed. I'd just take my next dose and it would power me up again. This went on for months — but something had to give.
One night, I was lying in bed at 3AM, still utterly wired from the drugs, and I think I might have died? I had the strangest sensation, an iciness I'd never felt before, radiating outwards from the centre of my chest.
I was aware that ADHD medications had been known to cause sudden cardiac death in a very tiny minority of cases. I'd had some heart issues before; as a tall man, my ticker has to pump a lot harder to get the blood from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Could this be it, I wondered? Had my heart stopped for good, and was my blood instantly cooling as a result? At the time, in the middle of the night, I shrugged it off, put it down to my sleep-deprived drug-addled mind playing tricks on me, waited to hear the birdsong so I could get up, get my next fix.
The next day, over breakfast, I took a look at my heart rate report from my Garmin watch. And there it was. Right in the middle of the peaks and troughs of my pumps was a little gap where no heart rate data existed, pretty much exactly where I had that sensation. Of course, there are many explanations for this: my watch could have slipped off my wrist a little, it could have just malfunctioned for a minute, or it could have been that my heart literally stopped for a few beats. I'll never know, but it was enough to give me a scare.
I stopped taking Elvanse soon after. I still miss it, or, more precisely, I _miss the person I was when I was taking it. But it showed me that I was capable at least, of existing like everyone else. I had to find new, non-amphetamine-powered ways to boost my focus: exercise (but not too much), careful planning (a little every day), and timers (but not too long) help me knuckle down and get shit done. I've also found a new medication that's helped my day-to-day existence.
More on that later. Unless it kills me.
Yeah, so I'm posting some stuff up here. These are random thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for the past 10 years that I've never put to paper.
I like this site because I can't save posts as drafts, which usually means a slow and interminable death on a server somewhere. Instead, I have to post them as they are, and there's no edit function, so there will inevitably be typos and grammar stuff. But I think this might be a good thing because people will know I haven't had any LLM help.
Thanks for reading!
It was a grey November day some nine years ago. I had just cycled down a big hill in Bath and reached the kind of absurdly stupid roundabout system where everyone needs to pay extra attention. As I rode along, I was suddenly aware of a presence on my left side, drawing impossibly close, and in adrenaline-enhanced slow-motion I was given a glancing blow by a car that threw me off my bike.
As I careened into the next lane in adrenaline-enhanced slow motion, I didn't think of my family and my life didn't flash before my eyes. Instead, I thought: this is going to be amazing for my YouTube channel.
~
Filming rides combined two things I loved: filmmaking and cycling. As part of a grouptest for T3, I'd accumulated a handful of action cameras, and I started attaching them to various points on my bike and person and recording my rides, then uploading them to YouTube. I became part of a then-small circle of camera cyclists that included people such as CyclingMike and CycleGaz. My first big hit, "Close Pass, a Slap and a Chat," documented a taxi driver who passed within inches of my handlebars, and then became irate when I slapped the side of his car.
From there, my channel grew. Vehicles would do things that, while illegal, probably weren't all that bad; turning left in front of me while I was slowly ascending a hill, or driving past the advanced stop line. I would get angry and upload the videos, and while a lot of viewers seemed to support me, a growing minority would say things like; "that was far too aggressive," or, "you're looking for trouble." I carried on posting, reviewing footage, editing it, uploading it maybe twice a week.
But those doubts began to take hold. Most camera cyclists are based in London, where conflict is diluted and washed away in the vastness of the metropolis. But Bath is a "city" that's smaller than a lot of UK towns. I put a lot of effort into keeping my YouTube channel and social media accounts anonymous, but there was still a nagging feeling that people knew who I was and what I was doing. I also made the ridiculously stupid but completely innocent mistake of posting an upload from a pretty major website's Twitter account.
This insecurity came to a head on that drizzly November day. As a cyclist, you always imagine drivers to be these extravagantly hairy men intent on plowing through anything that moves. But the driver who hit me was a young mum. She was so remorseful, so apologetic, maybe more upset than I was. She was absolutely in the wrong, but she was also a person who had made a mistake, just like I had on Twitter.
I deleted my YouTube and social media accounts a little later. I still have that video floating around on a hard drive somewhere, but it's likely to never see the light of day. Now, I think this is worth another post, I try and avoid conflict wherever possible.
"Hey Google. Make a note."
"Sure. What do you want it to say?"
"44:21. Thoughts on AI."
For the past eight years, once a week, usually on a Wednesday morning, this has been a familiar conversation. Part of my job at Chaos was listening to and writing up episodes of the CG Garage podcast, which consisted of conversations between host and CG pioneer Chris Nichols and esteemed members of the VFX industry.
Chaos was a work-from-home job, and I was lucky enough to be given free rein. So rather than hunching over my desk listening to the podcast, I'd pop in wireless headphones and go out on my bike. I figured out a route that would take 30 minutes each way (the podcast was usually an hour), and used Google Assistant on my phone to make notes of interesting anecdotes or changes of topic.
I got it down to a fine art: my route was largely off-road, so it didn't matter that I had headphones in, I figured out how to keep my phone's display on so I could keep track of the time. When I got home, I'd have timecodes for all the most important moments, and then it was just a question of joining the dots.
Were you taking the piss, Henry? Riding your bike while you're meant to be working? Maybe. But since my diagnosis with ADHD, I've come to realise that exercise can be the key to helping me focus my attention while giving me a chance to think things through. But something more interesting happened: I would come to associate physical space with whatever the podcast guest was talking about. There's a particular hill in Bristol that I will forever associate with an amusing anecdote about a party in Wales with Digital Domain co-founder Scott Ross (there are many amusing anecdotes about Scott Ross).
This association between time and space even gave me a kind of superpower. If there was a missing part of my voice notes, I could work out where I was at a particular time, fast-forward or rewind the route in my head, and then recall what the guest was talking about, and fill in the gaps.
Off-bike, the time I worked best was on the hour-and-a-half train journey from Bristol to London, and I used to joke that if I caught a train to Edinburgh I'd be able to write a book. There's something about moving through space, be it new or familiar, that boosts brain power; maybe because you're mentally mapping your surroundings all the time and this is encouraging blood flow to other parts of the brain. I'm - obviously - not a neurologist.
For me, this only works on a bike or train, as well. With both, you're relaxed but focused on your surroundings just enough. On a train, you can look out of the window and always see something different or new. On a bike, you're thinking about your pedals spinning and where the bike's going, and that's pretty much it. Car journeys make me feel sick and stressed and cloud my thoughts. There's too much going on, too much to think about, even when you're a passenger.
~
I no longer work at Chaos, maybe because I spent time riding my bike when I should have been working. Inevitably, those long bike rides, accompanied by Chris' voice and his guests' thoughts, are the part of the job I miss most.
Today, I retraced my podcast route, genuinely worried that it would be upsetting to revisit those locales without ever hearing the podcast again (I can't bring myself to listen to it now that I don't work on it). But it was replaced with something else: the sound of birds singing, dogs barking, people chatting, the drone of my freehub, the distant hum of city traffic. Things that I'd never heard on this route before. I felt a kind of inner peace that's been missing for a long, long time. My mind wandered and I thought, maybe I should write this all down.
I once bought a submarine with the intention of turning it into a crazy golf venue. But it turned out to be sub-par.
I was recently cast in a recreation of the making of Terminator 2. I was set to play the guy who did the music, but someone pipped me to the post. They offered me the chance to be the stand-in for some shots. I turned it down because I didn't want to play second Fiedel.
I bought a Batsuit, but I'm far too fat for it. I'm going to send it back using Batman Returns.
glassdoor.com should be renamed burnedbridge.com
I was recently approached by a guy who wanted to sell me a portion of Wadi Rumm, in Jordan, where David Lean filmed Lawrence of Arabia. I almost bought it, but it turned out to be far too expansive.
Penguins are just big ducks.
There's a remarkably subtle detail in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace: some spray painted Epson inkjet cartridges attached to Anakin's bedroom wall. I think they were chosen because they looked futuristic. Curiously, George Lucas digitally removed the cartridges in the 2019 reissue. Apparently they weren't Canon.
You could make a sequel to both Quadrophenia and Con Air. It could be called Mod Cons.
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