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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m writing this on a new computer. My last ThinkPad lasted eight years, which is unprecedented - before it, I beat a laptop to death every eighteen months. I wonder how long I’ll get out of this one. It only took me two days to get the wifi working properly on it ffs

But I finally have a laptop at full processing power, after some months of having to limit the number of applications and tabs I had open at the same time, which is a relief.

Today I am writing the solicitation text for graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA. Looks like it will be out in November.

THE WORLD SERVICE

Did anyone else look at the final trailer for Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY and think to themselves… “No, I’m good”? Or was that really just me?

I understand the SUPERGIRL film cratered on release. I haven’t seen it. I saw one of the trailers, and it looked like a Guardians Of The Galaxy film. I haven’t read the graphic novel it’s based on, although one article I saw this week suggested it’s a riff on TRUE GRIT, with Supergirl in the Rooster Cogburn role, and I guess the TRUE GRIT structure didn’t provide enough stakes so the film added in the poisoning of the CGI dog. The thing about TRUE GRIT is that it doesn’t really hang if Rooster Cogburn is 21, so I presume there’s more to it than that. I dunno, maybe Jason Momoa as Lobo was supposed to be Rooster Cogburn, but I hear his appearance is basically an extended cameo. All of this means that I don’t have an informed opinion, which means I don’t have an opinion worth listening to.

In the film press I read, there seems to have been a lot of talk about whether this should really have been the second film from the new DC regime, whether there was any appetite for the character, many comments about the massive rounds of audience testing, observations that it plays a hell of a lot more like a James Gunn film than a Craig Gillespie films, lots of backseat driving.

Listen, Supergirl’s tv show lasted literally twice as long as Wonder Woman’s and she was a lot more recent in the culture than the gap between Lynda Carter and Gal Godot. It was a fair call and not the worst idea for a follow-up to the Superman film on the face of it.

It’s possible, however, that they just didn’t know where their audience was.

The other week, I mentioned DOCTOR WHO and their not seeming to know where their audience was landing - if eight year olds are really watching alt-universe Regency fops fucking on BRIDGERTON, then space babies and cuddly toys aren’t landing where your audience is. On the other hand, maybe a cosmic comedic murdery take on Supergirl just wasn’t where people were. Maybe everyone went to see BACKROOMS and OBSESSION instead, because those films knew what they were and weren’t tested to death first.

OPERATIONS

PLAYBOX

I finally cracked and bought the Snowsky Echo Mini mp3 player (UK) (US), and a pair of KS ZS10 PRO earbuds (UK) (US) to go with it. I already have a dozen 256GB SD cards. The Echo Mini doesn’t handle playlists, which will be a killer for a lot of people, but I tend to listen to one album at a time, so it doesn’t bother me too much.

However, I am building One Giant Folder on one card. Trawling through my library and just picking songs I like. No theme, rhyme or reason, just stuff I can happily listen to again and again.

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

Coming up on the end of season 1 of COLLIDE.

ORBITAL

Today I discovered that the entire American tv series version of MAX HEADROOM is on the Internet Archive.

That’s all you need to know, right?

Go. Have fun. I once had a conversation or two with some people about MAX HEADROOM, after Matt Frewer told me he was aware of a “treasure map” to the rights situation on it. Didn’t come to anything in the end, and I suspect it all would have been enough trouble to take years off my life, but it still haunts me sometimes. There’s a handful of maybes and not-quites in my career like that - another is getting within a hair’s breadth of being able to take a crack at adapting ROADSIDE PICNIC for tv, after sitting down with AMC about another project entirely (which also did not take off).

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The Fitbit is on the shelf, the Apple Watch sits on a charger, the Bee is in a drawer, and I’m seriously thinking about having a newspaper delivered. 

There was a spate of about three weeks where it seemed like every book and film I took in featured people reading newspapers. And it started to feel so... peaceful. Savoir-vivre. I have eight newspapers and magazines sent to my phone. But the idea of sitting with just one good newspaper at the coffee shop does have a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

I’ve actually just bought myself a new mp3 player, the Snowsky Echo Mini, in the hopes that it’s just a little less cranky than the cheap no-name Chinese one I picked up the other month. I often take the Kindle to the deli for lunch because it is, in Amber Case’s framing, calm technology, and a lighter carry than the 1000-page books I seem to be reading this year. 

But a newspaper would be lighter still. 

And then, of course, I remembered that newsagents don’t exist any more and newspaper deliveries went the way of the dodo some years ago. Mostly because of people like me.

So instead I went out to have some links removed from a new watch, went to a gallery, stopped off at the deli for a charcuterie board and a glass of wine. I’d love to tell you that I didn’t look at my phone once, but I read a couple of longish articles on Le Monde over the afternoon.

You can’t cosplay as being a cafe thinker with a newspaper. But there is something to be said for slowing down. This section has been brought to you by a vodka martini I made myself at 10pm on Friday night. (Rinse the glass with white vermouth and throw the excess away. Pour in one large measure of vodka that you keep in the freezer. Take one long strip of lemon peel, twist it over the glass and then drop it in.)

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT

Olga Tokarczuk writes what she calls “constellation novels.” Pick a setting and a person, and then roam the world around them, drifting from point to point, person to person, in fragments, until an entire sky of story is pieced together. Connected by imagined lines until a shape is formed. People have written about the “networked narrative” and the “systems novel,” but Tokarczuk independently invented her own version, something earthier and stranger.

It’s a drifting time-traveller of a book, wandering between decades and even centuries. Mentions of things become the circling of them and then deep dives through time into them. The stories of a village that was Polish, German and then Polish again, a liminal zone where the past leaks out of the ground.

The astonishing thing is that it does find a shape, connections are made, and it forms into a folk tale of sorts. It wants you to know that, in the grimmest of times and places… there’s still magic.

HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US)

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I had a whole plan for the newsletter this year. The year did not go to plan. Many reasons. A good deal of them were out of my control. Shit happens. Projects die at the oven door, as a friend of mine likes to say. Everything is set up and suddenly it’s all circling the bowl.

It happens all the time, to everybody. That’s the thing to remember. There can be years of one step forwards and two steps back. For every project you see from any creator, there are probably ten dead ones laying in a ditch behind it.

The only thing under your control is making new things. Every new project is a new roll of the dice, a new thing you want to make, a new set of opportunities and lessons. You don’t stop learning and you don’t stop losing. You have to bear in mind that winning is a happy surprise, but it’s not what you do it all for. You do it for the joy of making new things and putting them out into the world.

Take care of yourself. You’re doing fine, all things considered. See you next week.

W