G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y

Decision: Will only assign any given day to working on a single project. Shifting gears between several messes with my head too much.

Quite enjoying the degree of experimentation that Project OLDBOOK (pictured) is affording me right now, and it seems to have come at a right time as it is starting to inform how I might handle a particular scene in the next TSG I've been thinking about.

#work

Had big plans for today (accounting, Project OLDBOOK, TSG, and cooking up a storm) but have instead been rendered paralyzed by an unforgiving migraine. Medication useless. Hard to do anything at all when you can hardly use your eyes or even think through the sharp jabs of the dull knife of pain.

#journal

“First thing in the morning”—Great value is placed on the first thing you do in the morning; be it slurping a spoonful of raw honey, exercise, making your bed, journaling, showering or what have you, it feels like every other person will advise you to do that one particular thing in the morning. That if you do that one thing, the rest of your day is somehow supposed to go swimmingly. Problem is though you can't possibly do all those things first thing in the morning. By definition, the first thing in the morning can only be one single thing. Which one should it be?

I'm tempted to give up and do absolutely nothing at all at this point. Spend my first hour staring at a wall or something.

#journal

Newsletter out, last time through Substack. Transitioning over to EmailOctopus, because their pricing tiers strike me as fair and one of my favorite newsletters (Dense Discovery) does some nice layout stuff with it, and I'd like to do some nice things with mine, really make it my own. Hoping to get it going by next month, and sticking to a monthly schedule from here on out. I can't believe there was a time when I managed to do it weekly. Like how do you even?

Inboxes and RSS reader at zero, fridge replenished, and a couple contracts drafted and sent out. Tomorrow I bake granola, ink two pages of TSG, and hopefully manage to carve out 3-ish intensely productive hours on another thing I've agreed to do; let's call it PROJECT OLDBOOK. I'd also like to squeeze in some exercise before taking my kid out to dinner.

Beat.

#journal

Great analysis of folk horror on Mangal Media's substack.

It's got me thinking that a reversal of the typical folk horror narrative might be worthy to explore, as it seems to me that narratives often described as folk horror are inherently pro-colonialist and pro-assimilation.

Perhaps instead of a narrative about an urban outsider arriving at an isolated pagan society to discover how fucked up they live, it may be time for one where the outsider comes away with the realization that his or her own world is in fact the fucked up one.

#research #story

Third day in a row to wake up with a migraine. Beginning to think that the culprit lies in my new supplements.

In other news, my TBR pile has grown rather unruly.

Some of these are partially read (a terrible habit), and that's not even taking my Kindle titles into consideration. I also have a borrowed copy of Rushdie's THE SATANIC VERSES coming in from a friend. Will have to move onto that one so I don't end up holding onto it for too long, and then I think I'll get going on Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING which I have actually yet to read but am kind of dying to after watching the film adaptation for the first time a few weeks ago.

It's a hot, beautiful day here in Houston, Texas, temperatures soaring at 26 celsius just asking for one to kick back and linger but I cannot turn off my brain from the great many to-do`s on my plate, whether it's continued work on some of my ongoing projects or the resuscitation of things I've been neglecting like the website and newsletter. I've also been putting off accounting for way too long now, and there are a number of houses things to tend to.

Also thinking about how to best maneuver work stuff with the summer month I'll be getting to exclusively spend with my kid (a first for me). Was initially thinking of planning a trip for us to Egypt during that month, but there are time, cost, and logistical considerations to take into account.

No wonder my head hurts.

#journal #reads

“Just one gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It's that kind of energy, some say, that could boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.”

It could also—and, if history has taught us anything, probably will—do other things.

“An antimatter engine could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft at 1g (9.8 meters per second squared) getting us to Proxima in just five years... That's 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1 — one of the fastest spacecraft in history — to travel about half the distance, according to NASA.

“Even within our own solar system, an antimatter-powered spacecraft could reach Pluto in 3.5 weeks compared to the 9.5 years it took NASA's New Horizons probe to arrive.

“The engine system would first gather high-energy positrons from krypton-79 and then direct them toward a layer of regular matter, producing annihilation energy.”

Annihilation energy.

But apparently, this is all in fact pretty old science:

“In 1953, Austrian physicist Eugen Sänger proposed a “photon rocket” that would run on positron annihilation energy.”

The hurdle seems to be: (a) Funding, and (b) Testing. Regarding the latter, one has to be very careful where to go about testing “annihilation” energy apparently. One scientist has a remarkably bright idea though:

”'So we need an ability to test high energy density systems somewhere that don't threaten the biosphere, but still allow us to develop them,' said Howe, who thinks the moon would make a good testing base. 'And if something goes wrong, you melted a piece of the moon,' and not Earth, he added.”

Swell.

More here.

#research #space #weapons

11:20am and brain is still mush. Slow start today, and quite a bit to do. One more page to rough out on the latest TSG, before fiddling with other art stuff. One of them a painting I started yesterday, and the other a sort-of-music-video that involves producing 13 pages of art-journaling a day.

Hopefully also time to exercise and cook chicken for my little one this afternoon.

Reading about Cory Doctorow's approach to blogging via Warren Ellis' blog and realizing it is somewhat akin to what I wanted to do... not so much with my blog per se but with my website more generally. In that I aspired to have all my output appear on Ganzeer.com first prior to posting and/or announcing elsewhere but it hasn't quite worked out that way. In some instances—as seems to be the case with Cory—some such material would find publication elsewhere.

This also mirrors my thoughts on publishing—which may be flawed—but I like the idea of self-publishing first, albeit on a limited scale, and then later licensing that material to larger publishers for wider distribution. Granted, there are publishers that wouldn't want to touch previously published material, but I do think this approach does protect one's work from the potential of overt editorial interference in addition to ownership of the work.

Which makes me circle back to the idea of a regular zine. There's something awfully attractive about publishing a regular 96-page B&W thing 4 times a year chockfull of drawings, essays, comix, stories, and maybe even the occasional serialized novel. Just whatever one's creative brain vomits, and if by the end of the year somethings in there warrant their own “professional” publication, well then cool.

Not a good time to have these thoughts (refer to first paragraph).

Level unlocked: I have discovered a combination of potions that enable me to get done everything I set out to do on any given day. As long as I skip showers, neglect dishes, and have enough leftovers.

Enter your email to subscribe to updates.