Week 35, 2018
Sun Sep 2, 2018
Everything is awful. Our planet and societies are facing numerous ecological collapses inflicted by humanity. There’s no escape in the face of post-capitalism flattening all cultural consumption into a desert of mega-franchises. All we can do is record our activities and perceptions in the desperate hope of being able to reconstruct the a place outside of what Alexei Yurchak called “HyperNormalisation”. This is my attempt for week 35, 2018.
Status & Plan (Monday)
- It is a bank holiday weekend here in the UK. Mostly I have played Nier: Automata because it is highly enjoyable game. Also, a better cut of science fiction than most contempory efforts, but then it’s a weird game for weird people, not film and TV executives.
- A long funk over my personal writing projects has reached the point where I’m abandoning the current project. It isn’t working for me. There’s thousands of words building a road into an empty marsh. It was starting to affect my already low levels of enthusiasm
- Tomorrow a project I’ve been working on goes into testing again. It mostly went well last time. Let’s hope that it goes better this time
- I have to attend a funeral on Friday. Up north. Earlier today I bought a black suit and tie. Two things that I’ve avoided buying my entire adult life
- After putting these notes together I’m going to start a new short fiction project. I’m going to try hard to keep it constrained and realistic. Let’s say the first draft must be finished by September 8th
- I really need to decide what shmup I’m learning. There are so many to choose from!
- As I write this I’m listening to a band called Tunng, reccomended by Johnny Chiodini. Very apt for a rainy August bank holiday
The Retrospective (Sunday)
- The funeral went as well as those things can be expected to go
- Yesterday, I spent the day carving up the second half of Nier: Automata stretched out on the floor. I finished ending A just before lunch today. The gameplay loop of Nier is a rare of example of something that gets me addicted. Any game/text which has a robot cargo culting Jean-Paul Satire is enjoyable
- Instead of finishing Invisible Cities (which I’m going to spend some time with soon), I read “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” by Michael Lewis. Narrative non-fiction with reasonable amount of surface detail is another thing that I can get addicted to.
- I think the work project went well, but since I was out of the office on Friday I need to check the figures tomorrow morning. The data I had on Thursday evening was positive
- There were three sequential days of work on the short story project, with the last day Wednesday, being a tired slog at the writing group/circle in a desperate attempt to earn reward beer in the pub after. I’m happy with the progress that I’ve made so far
- I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s last album “You Want it Darker” again while I hide in a darkened study in post-headache and post-coffee clarity.