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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I am tapped out. By the time you read this, I will hopefully be out of the office and pretty much offline. It’s been a long bloody year, I’ve barely been out of the office at all, and I am empty of good ideas or the ability to see a script properly. I’m behind on everything, I just got another job contract in, I need to generate five pending projects (two for this newsletter) and one of my artists is approaching the point where he will run out of pages. But when you’re empty, you’re empty.

Forwards!

In this letter:

• Online

• Codenames

• anti matters

• Blazing World

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

ONLINE

I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to be online your entire life. I saw a newsletter the other day talking about some fake scandal about a livestreamer being accused of using a shock collar on his dog (he didn’t), and there was a phrase therein along the lines of “he spends almost every waking hour livestreaming and there are tens of thousands of hours of video of him that people can take out of context and manipulate.” And it just got me to thinking - I can barely manage six posts a day on LTD and people like this guy are constantly online and constantly on. And the archives of that activity are almost like a public version of Buckminster Fuller’s Chronofile, his system that logged his life every fifteen minutes, every waking hour, for sixty-five years. Wanna see what that archive looks like?

With more than 140,000 papers and 1,700 hours of audio and video, all stretching to more than 1,400 linear feet of material, Fuller's life might be the most documented life of all time. The files go back to when he was four-years-old, but he only seriously started the archive in 1917. From then until his death in 1983 he collected everything from each day, with ingoing and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, models, and even the mundane ephemera like dry cleaning bills.

Source

I think about the Chronofile once every year or two. Especially a public one - private things are for paper notebooks. Livestreaming is, of course, more accessible, almost more ambient - these people who livestream eight hours a day are somewhere between a tv on in the background and a friend keeping you company. It’s a different degree of separation from someone who writes you regular letters, or sticks pieces of their notebook up in public for you to read.

We’ve gone to an interesting place, I think. Being invited to surveille someone full-time over the internet isn’t new - lifecasting, for one example - but for a certain class of creator and viewer, it’s become the norm. It is, on one level, constant production - but the viewer cannot stay fully and actively engaged with it all day. (Unlike the livestreamer, who has to time their bathroom breaks down to the second). It’s monetised disengagement, almost.

There used to be a thing called the blogosphere, which was everyone writing longform online all the time. Social media decimated the blogosphere. I wonder what decimates longform livestreaming, and when.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Jennifer Ringley, who was the immensely popular lifecaster JenniCam twenty-odd years ago, made damn sure she vanished from the internet when she quit streaming, and never went back.

Bonus round: sousveillance.

OPERATIONS

CODENAMES

All the art for PROJECT LOST SIERRA is now in.

Someone wrote in the other week to remind me that it was (probably) me who started this thing of coming up with PROJECT codenames in order to be able to talk about things that were unannounced or in development. I’ve been doing it for years, and I still see it showing up in all kinds of places. I’ve lost a lot of the codenames I had - I’ve been doing it since before PROJECT KRONSTADT, which was the first two seasons of the CASTLEVANIA tv show. I use the names of places as codenames, places that seem thematically tied to the project. THE BATMAN’S GRAVE was PROJECT TRICORNER, because Tricorner is a place in Gotham City.

Of course, codenames also help to cover up that some projects never make it to release. A colleague of mine says “they die at the oven door.” Talk to anyone in the creative arts for long enough and you’ll find out just how many dead projects they’re carrying on their back. If you’re struggling to get something finished or struggling to get it out in the world? You’re still part of the club. We have all been there. And we will all be there again. The trick is to just not give up.

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ORBITAL

anti matters

New Dean Haspiel comic.

Next summer, a Frank Miller autobio. (UK) (US)

DOOMSCROLLR seems to be a Tumblr clone? Hard to tell from the front end, but maybe useful to some of you?

The Dark Forest Operating System 

…a new private internet for creative groups to hang, plan, and make meaning and money together.

The open web is no longer a viable home for creative work or community. People post less in public spaces because the downsides outweigh the positives (trolls, scraping, training models, an increasingly dead internet). DFOS gives groups the ability to come together, share ideas and projects, and operate with aligned economics in private worlds of their own.

The Dark Forest OS will open in limited beta later this year. To pre-register your own space, visit DFOS.com.

If community is a thing you have access to, then maybe that might be useful for something?

OPS

BLAZING WORLD

Parliament, for its part, had passed laws in 1606 against swearing and drunkenness (it was helpfully defined by a leading legal commentator as the condition ‘where the same legs which carry a man into the house cannot bring him out again’).

This week, I am reading THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND by Jonathan Healey, and it’s full of good bits:

Another victim was William Prynne, a firebrand Puritan. Prynne was a pompous prude with a poisonous pen, among whose literary output was a broadside against men wearing long hair, entitled The Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628). In 1634, his Histriomastix launched an extended tirade against the theatre world, containing an attack on women who acted in plays (index entry: ‘Woman actors, notorious whores’). This was taken as, and indeed probably was, another slingshot aimed at the queen, so Prynne won little sympathy as Star Chamber tossed him in prison and snipped off the top of his ears. It was said that Attorney General William Noy laughed so hard at the punishment that he bled from his penis.

Healey is extremely good at the earthy details - even the godly King James is recorded as saying ‘A turd for your argument!’ to an actual bishop. It livens up the narrative considerably, although Healey handles the extensive cast of players and the timeline very well.

Arthur Aston, who commanded the garrison for much of the war, was remembered as a ‘testy, forward, imperious and tyrannical person, hated in Oxon and elsewhere by God and man’.

This book, covering the Seventeen Century in England - the Civil War, the apparent end of monarchy, the Interregnum and the republics, the Restoration and all - is huge, fascinating, and a lot more entertaining than you might expect.

THE BLAZING WORLD (UK) (US)

New Julianna Barwick record, this time with Mary Lattimore:

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day

Nine Bells: evening notes

NORD Fragrances

Todd Blackwood’s NOSFERATU

Return Of The Good Beard Oil

DREAMLORE, Laura Cannell

THE BRUTALIST (2024)

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I’m off. No more screens for me for a day. Go and sit by the window. Take care of yourself. See you next week.

W