Wicked Problems

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. There are six weeks of summer left, I’m building a new routine, herself is off at a music festival because in this house we don’t let the old person in (she’s done Australia, Vietnam, Thailand and Spain this year, so a bit of headbanging won’t kill her), and I’m at the coffee shop, earbuds in and kicking around some new ideas.

Yeah: pale blue summer-weight denim and a pale blue linen jacket. Who even am I?

I like to find little bits of happiness all day. Getting dressed is one of them.

Also I made a chilled non-dairy alcoholic chocolate hazelnut mousse that you would all kill for.

Housekeeping: I am aware that the YouTube embeds are breaking in Gmail on the web. They appear to be clickable, but they don’t display properly. I’ll try to use them less until Beehiiv notices and fixes the problem.

Ganzeer and Emmy-winning director Yasmin Elayat are turning THE SOLAR GRID into a videogame.

An image from Aron Wiesenfeld’s upcoming graphic novel RUNOFF:

I read about an interview with Andy Burnham the other day. When he was an MP in his thirties, he did a tv interview that he felt he’d done well in. Walking off the set, he checked his phone and found a text from his wife, which read, in its entirety, “ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.”

Is it too late to have her as prime minister instead?

In my creative consulting role, I work with lovely, insane people who won’t even let me do them a favour or two. If I try, then something like this arrives in the mail:

It’s a Panerai Table Clock. Manual wind, eight-day power reserve. Gloriously analogue and mechanical. It now lives on my desk. As you may be able to tell, it’s spherical, and when you turn it around you can see the movement working.

I like G-Shock watches. I have one of the standard big ruggedised digital ones for garden work. A ways back, I discovered there was a stainless steel analogue version, which I picked up cheap on eBay. And then this arrived in the mail by complete surprise:

It’s titanium.

Here’s something I really do NOT want from Casio, though:

It’s a ring watch. I mean, that’s just strange, right? Right?

I just approved the solicits for graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA, which will, it seems, be solicited at the end of the month. Little bit nerve wracking. Probably a lot more so for the artist, as she’s been working on this book for a couple of years. It looks amazing, and I can’t wait to show you some of it.

Graphic novella PROJECT EXPLOITS RIVER has now moved to lettering phase, with an old colleague of mine taking care of that. Which reminds me that he, I and the artist have to have an argument about the logo soon. Heh.

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.

OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics in November.

In military nomenclature, a wicked problem is a problem without a solution. The term is borrowed from systems theory and refers to a problem so complex and so dynamic that by the time it reveals itself, the conditions of the problem will have already changed.

Scientists make first viruses designed by AI. Which I’m sure I’d feel better about if I wasn’t reading BIOLOGICAL WAR by Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US) which describes a scenario of a genetically modified plague virus escaping.

It was during the Black Death that the word “quarantine” emerged. In the fourteenth century, after authorities figured out that foreign ships were bringing infected people into European cities, harbor officials required vessels to anchor off the coast of a port city for forty days, a period of time after which the infected become the dead. In Italian, quaranta giorni translates as “forty days.”

DISCIPLINE: a gorgeously strange short directed by Mona Fastvold on MUBI. Fastvold was the co-writer of THE BRUTALIST and director of THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE, and the music is by Daniel Blumberg, also of THE BRUTALIST.

You can join MUBI here.

One of these women is an actor you may recognise.

What if life on earth actually arose twice?

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And now I’m testing one single YouTube embed to see if it’s working properly this week:

If it doesn’t, no need to tell me, I view these letters in five different email apps after sending.

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.

PRINT MORE SHIT OUT.

Taking photos is fine, making videos is cool, but, but, but, there’s nothing quite like printing a photo zine of 10 or so process photos, and then just having it.

I’ve made a promise to myself to make more zines, 10 photos and a cover is easy, each “project” no matter how small should end up with either a zine, and “photo book” (in the very loosest of terms), or some postcards.

Because - and I say this with love - it doesn’t need to be complicated.

— Dan Catt

A reminder to myself that I have gotten very bad at printing things out for myself, and a nudge for some of you that home printers AND online print-on-demand services exist. Make stuff. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

Click through. I thought some of you might find that useful.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:

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And that’s me this week. It’s been one of those scattered weeks where I haven’t gotten enough done on anything because too much stuff has been happening around the edges. But this will pass. And there are still little bits of happiness to be found every day. You won’t have to look for them as hard as you think you will. Go be happy. See you next week.

W