October was a busy month, with lots of work and deadlines. Life recently is a competition between good and bad days. The bad days are mostly due to being overtired or not feeling well. The good days are when I get stuck into things, and enjoy working hard. I’ve won more than I’ve lost, and I’ve got a lot done.
I went away for four days to Wales. This was mostly planned as downtime. I broke a personal rule and ended up working while away – the project was not in the right place for me to handover. But I did get a lot of reading done, and felt more relaxed when I came back. I stayed the last night in Portmeirion, where I had an amazing meal.
Walking 10,000 steps a day is proving hard work, and will get worse as the nights draw in over the next two months. But it seems to be working. Gym visits are proving hard to schedule.
October and November are busy with writing, with the advent calendar to finish and the Mycelium Parish News starting. I also had a workshop to prepare and ran a good test session for this. The advent calendar went to print.
Thanks to the holiday, I did a lot of reading. The third King & Straub Talisman novel, Other Worlds Than These was long and felt a little like being stuck doing errands with someone. The dystopian book group chose The Gate to Women’s Country. I had to miss the session so blogged about it here. Books on ‘creativity’ are generally poor, but Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic was a wonderful book, mixing speculation with good, grounded advice. I also read Lucian Randall’s Disgusting Bliss, a 2010 book on Chris Morris. Naomi Booth’s Sealed was read in 24-hours, helped by a bout of insomnia, and was am excellent piece of body horror. Midnight Timetable was the Drawing Blood book club selection, and I’ve blogged about it. I re-read Hearts in Atlantis ready for the Talking Scared discussion. It’s King at his most sentimental and I loved it.
October was another slow month for films. Neither Bad Apples nor Digger worked for me. Rosy and I watched the first season of Time. It was horrifying to see how unsafe and badly run prisons are. The end was frustrating, feeling a bit too much like ‘drama’, with various heavily telegraphed twists playing out. I also watched Japanese time loop drama River which I have yet to write up. Halloween brought a cinema double bill of Donnie Darko and a midnight showing of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
I’m loving work at the moment – had some fun visits to the office and I’m enjoying working with colleagues. I ran a couple of sessions – a workshop on ‘how to run a meeting’ and a discussion around the recent OpenAI/Huggingface hack. I did have a couple of moments where I think about how a product company would be easier than the plate-spinning of a consultancy. That soon passed.
Details of the PHP2Shell hack emerged while I was on holiday. This meant upgrading several servers at short notice. I’m starting to question whether AI now means that I can no longer support my own servers.
The second Hamonicon event took place in Todmorden. I attended one talk on the Saturday, planning to come back for most of the Sunday. Instead I had one of the worst migraines of my life, spending much of the day being sick. I mostly have fewer headaches lately, so this was disappointing.
I spent a few days playing deck-building game Inscryption. I’d heard there was an interesting twist and persevered with the help of Claude. I made it to the twist, although I’m now struggling to make further progress.
And that was October. One last thing: the new Jamie T record Ghosts (100 Days of Morning) was amazing.