Author: orbific

April has been another month balancing work with everything else. Despite project deadlines, I’ve mostly kept on top of things – although a lack of sleep towards the end of the month got the better of me. Mostly, things have settled into a rhythm and a lot of things seem to be on the right track.

Having said that, the Easter Bank Holiday was hard work. I’m always excited about the potential of four days off; and then I spend the time shattered and exhausted. Maybe part of this is emerging from the winter. But I think 2027 James should just book a holiday for Easter and go away.

I’ve restarted my weekly story email list, and I’m enjoying the rhythm. It’s tricky to get a new thing ready each week, but I prefer this to not doing it. I’m still frustrated by a desire to write a novel, but setting out on a large project has never worked for me in the past. But I like the idea of growing a structure for something from tiny fragments.

In a fit of procrastination, I returned to my South Downs Way project, setting up a new website. This project started just before the pandemic, and is made up of connected short stories – about 170 at current count. The connections and characters had got so out of hand that I found it hard to follow. Putting it on a website makes the structure visible and I’m excited by how compelling and strange it is. I’ve started writing stories for this project once more, and I will slowly begin drawing it together.

I found it a challenge to eat properly in April, which made my weight go haywire – but I’m still not making time for exercise. I wrote above about the challenge with balancing my life – and it’s sensible eating that always fails first when things get tough. As something-better-than-nothing, I’ve overcome my dislike of Google’s Fitbit takeover to start counting steps again.

Much of my reading time went this month went into clearing a few hundred articles that I’d sent to my Kindle in recent months. Clutter seems to be a problem everywhere in my life. I enjoyed an early preview of Ben Graham’s forthcoming novel Savage Jubilee. I re-read Riddley Walker, my choice for the Dystopian Book Club, but I was not able to make the actual event to discuss it.

I saw six movies over the month, none of them particularly great. Fight Club was entertaining for the first hour, but seemed to go on too long. I hated Project Hail Mary, and that’s fine. It wasn’t really a film aimed at me, and I spent a lot of time picking out holes in the plot (so, my physics degree is not a complete waste of time). Rosy and I watched How to Get to Heaven From Belfast which was fun, but I did sleep through a few bits due to absolute exhaustion. Two of April’s films at the Picture House were interrupted by people checking their phones, which is just annoying.

I’ve decided to stop playing The Last of Us Part 2 in favour of returning to Death Stranding 2. Kojima’s sequel is pretty good, but he doesn’t seem to understand what made the last game so great. I love the difficult hikes, the music, and building connections; I find the guns and violence trite. There are lots of games with boss fights, and most of those do that better. Maybe, possibly, there could be no guns at all in DS3.

I had more bad dreams about nuclear war, brought on by the Iran war. I find it hard to understand why the world is so reticent to condemn Trump’s violence and bullying. I can’t see how we will avoid a nuclear war in the next few years which makes everything feel pointless.

Some random highlights of the month – visiting Blackpool tower; a terrifying drive back through Storm Dave; a visit from Sooxanne that included a collage session at In a Land; Rosy doing an amazing poetry set as support for Joelle Taylor; a visit from Bev and her puppy Otis; looking after our new dog-friend Midge; Calder Valley Pride doing Stars in Their Eyes; Banh Mi with my new team at work.

• My dentist identified some problems with my teeth that will cost thousands to fix and involve major work. Maybe teeth are one of those things like enjoying Star Wars that I’ve aged out of.
• God is in the Algorithm is one of the best pieces of hip-hop journalism/criticism I’ve read.
• The Guardian published a lovely article on the Brighton 00’s music scene. This mostly happened in a different part of town to where I was, but it did spark a few memories.
• I had a comment on a 2018 post on DEAN, the graffiti artist. Blog comments are rare these days, and this was a particularly great one.
• From Jenny Offil’s Department of Speculation: “What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.”

March was a busy month with some big work deadlines, but I did a good job of staying relaxed. I had a client trip to London, visited Haworth with Naomi, and spent a few days in Leeds for some meetings. The Hebden Bridge Film Festival took place. I also sent out dozens of copies of the Mycelium Parish News. I ended the month exhausted, but it was a good exhaustion.

The 4th Mycelium Parish News was printed at the start of March – over 2 months late. We did a small print run and had to quickly reprint to meet demand – which is great. Doing the fulfilment for the Mycelium Parish News on top of preparations to run work appraisal sessions was challenging, but I kept on top of it. Like they say, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. Dan and I are slowly gathering items for the 2026 Parish News, but in a more organised way, so the next edition should be easier.

My writing is going well, but I’m still not establishing a flow of sending things out. I attended both Wednesday Writer sessions, which were fun, and I’ve been preparing an April workshop for them. I attended an inspirational playwriting workshop with In a Land, run by Sadie Clark. Among everything else, I’ve been working on the 2026 Advent Calendar and a special, secret project.

Fitness and health were a disaster in March. I was tired a lot, which made it hard to maintain a decent diet – my sugar cravings were sometimes irresistible. I gained a pound and was lucky to get away with that. I think it’s time to buy a new step-counter, but that’s not as easy as it could be because I hate Google’s absorption of Fitbit so much.

After last month’s movie binge I slowed down a little. I watched The Secret Agent, the last Oscar nominee I’d not seen, a day before the ceremony, meaning I’d seen all Best Picture nominees for the third year running. The following weekend was the Hebden Bridge Film festival, where I watched five movies and the short film competition. Apart from Rosy’s prizewinning film, my festival highlight was Koln 75, an incredible story about a teenager putting on a concert. I saw Sinners for the third time at a cinema and loved it. The Sound of Falling was an incredible experience. I also watched Eraserhead, but didn’t like it – not really a home movie experience, I guess.

I’ve been reading a lot this month, albeit chaotically. I caught up on Straub/King’s The Black House, read Evan Dando and Melissa Auf Der Maur’s new biographies, and a few less interesting books. The dystopian book club picked 80’s YA novel Futuretrack 5, which felt underwhelming and dated. Strange Buildings by Utekso was an interesting format, but I’ve never like mysteries all that much.

Work-wise, March was intense – although it’s felt nothing like as stressful as December. Client work was full-on, which meant I had little energy at the end of each day for consultancy work I needed to do, preparing for the annual appraisals. I’m approaching 3½ years in the role now and still loving it, which is unexpected and exciting.

On top of everything else with work, I need to learn about agentic AI to keep my skills relevant. I passed my GH-300 GitHub Copilot certification, which was so basic as to feel worthless. I’ve been playing a little with Claude, which is incredible for quick apps – in about 20 minutes I made a Spring Boot app to show me all locations from which you can see Stoodley Pike. But I need to build something more substantial. One of the biggest challenges I’ve found with agentic code is figuring out what I should make with it.

I’ve had some intense dreams since covid. One of my March dreams was about an enucleation cult, another about putting on a show with Lou Ice where we held the audience at gunpoint. Otherwise, I’m dreaming about work most nights, which I’m actually happy about. The work dreams to have driven off the bad dreams I’ve long had about growing up.

I appeared on the echologgorhea podcast, talking about my favourite work of art, Thomas Friedman’s 1000 Hours of Staring. There is some background elsewhere on my blog, as well as some older links I wrote after seeing this work of art. Rosy has also shared a video of me talking about the experience of seeing Picasso’s Guernica.

I’ve gone back to blogging. I was looking back at some old entries from the 2010s and realised how much I valued having these brief notes and curated photos (which I’ve written about in another entry). There’s something about the mode of writing where it’s in the open but not quite in public.

• On my visit to London, I saw Tracy Emin’s new show,
• PC Verrone’s This Obituary Has Been Redacted is a great short story.
• The March exhibition at In a Land was by Rachel Poulton, who photographs of Sussex made me feel homesick.
• We’ve been sorting the house out a little. It’s slow progress, but things feel better with every bit of decluttering and fixing.

• I still hate driving, but I’ve been using the car more for small trips recently. It’s a great improvement on public transport.
• Nuclear war terrifies me so I read a lot about it. Forgetting the Bomb tells the story of an essential material, codenamed Fogbank, that was so secret the US government forgot how to make it.
• I was thrilled to discover there was a local horse photographer – and disappointed at the Hebden Bridge Film Festival to learn this was actually a human who photographed horses.