• Fun Andy Weir interview, whose books I never read. I've only watched the movie adaptations, which weren't quite my jam, but judging a film-adaptation is no way to judge an author's work. Either way, the interview is fun and inspiring and does provide some food for thought.

• The entire part 1 of COLLIDER by Warren Ellis and Jerome Eyequem, which is being serialized at Warren's Orbital Operations newsletter. Strong STALKER vibes, but clearly far more demented.

• Steven Heller on his time as art-director for EVERGREEN, a magazine that “devolved” into a paperback periodical. Didn't even know this was a thing. Somewhere in the back of my mind I've been toying with the idea of a regular paperback zine of sorts for quite a long time now.

• Kickstarter for Catherine Tedford's PAPER BULLETS: 120 Years of Political Stickers From Around the World forthcoming from PM Press, which I'm fortunate to have some work in.

• Fonts-in-Use looks at fashion designer Tania Marcial's DELIVERY collection. Hard thrift-wear aesthetic.

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More podcast note-taking today and a new plumbing issue I gotta look into, when all I'd really like to do is read and write right now. Should also start thinking about the next edition of the RESTRICTED FREQUENCY newsletter, which is supposed to go out in 4 days. Do what you love and never have to work a day in your life, they said.

#radar

One of my pet peeves of living in America was how fresh herbs were treated like gold. You'd get less than an ounce of the stuff squished into a palm-sized plastic container for 2 bucks or more. Egypt has the opposite problem. Fresh herbs are in great abundance, and they're always sold in big bunches that go bad faster than you can put to use. So today, we are oven-drying rosemary for the first time. 4-6 hours apparently on the lowest setting for best results.

Writing is going oh so swell today.

“Conan in a trenchcoat.” – May just be the best line in this Frank Miller/Rick Rubin interview.

#journal #work #radar

WORKSTREAM: Got to see proofs for issue 2 of ELON magazine, which features my collab with Dominic Boyer, and it's fantastic! The Gigacities Collective have done a really great job at creating the new culture-jamming publication for our times. I'll remember to post again once it's out and there's more information on how to get it.

The complete THE SOLAR GRID box-set can now be nabbed through Asterism.

October is already here, which I'm gonna need to dedicate almost entirely to wrapping up TIMES NEW HUMAN if I can. Quite a bit of work travel slated for November, which knowing me will disrupt any semblance of flow.

Got the strangest email the other day inviting me to be interviewed about THE SOLAR GRID for a podcast... in exchange for a fee. Didn't even realize that was a thing now.

RADAR: Great Kim Stanley Robinson interview over at the Crisis and Critique Youtube channel.

Watched SOYLENT GREEN the other night for the first time! What a great goddamn movie! Can't believe it passed me by. It must be Ganzeer-discovers-the-70s season over here.

STATUS:

#work #journal #radar

RADAR:

• THE SOLAR GRID makes The Markaz Review's The Anthropocene Book List, a handsome list of 10 very fine books that I am humbled to see my demented graphic novel share company with.

• Steven Heller showcases 10 cover samples of UN SEDICESIMO, a 16-page Italian quarterly that provides a blank slate for a different artist to do whatever they want with each time. How I wish more books and graphic novel covers looked like these.

WORKSTREAM:

Today, apparently, is brain fog day. A condition I must overcome because there is much writing to be done and quite a bit of email to catch up on. Four coffees and a handful of cigarettes for breakfast did not help.

Inbox: 17, RSS: 9

STATUS:

#journal #radar

Fantastic video essay on Steven Spielberg's MUNICH, which I haven't seen since the first watch when it originally came out. Definitely due for a rewatch if for nothing else but the truly unparalleled masterful camera work alone.

Spent a full day assembling Ikea furniture and another full day breaking down all the boxes. I really hope it's the last time I crack open an Ikea box ever again as I am somewhat traumatized by the sight of anything Ikea after all the relocations made in the U.S. and the obligatory Ikea visits that would soon follow.

Though, realistically, I will soon have more Ikea in my immediate future; they somehow discovered on the day of delivery that certain items were out of stock. Items relating to some of the stuff that was actually delivered. Like say, the armchair's cushioning. I now have the frame of a chair assembled in the studio, completely unusable as a chair until its cushioning is restocked towards the end of the month, yay.

Alas, the dream of kicking back on a reading chair will have to wait for a while. Speaking of reading, I moved on to Tochi Onyebuchi's GOLIATH after dropping Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS. Paul Graham Raven shared an article by Alan Jacobs with me that perfectly summarizes my feelings about the book (before even finishing it), and I suspect those same feelings are likely to be carried forward into the remainder of Banks' “Culture Novels” were I to embark on diving into them, which I won't. I think I'm good. Unless new knowledge or insight is attained in the process of experiencing a supposedly entertaining piece of fiction, it actually isn't all that entertaining imho.

Inbox: 0, RSS: 0

#radar #journal

Season 3 of SILO ended with the media equivalent of being blue-balled.

Got around to watching PROJECT HAIL MARY with my significant other for the first time, and we might as well have put on a Disney cartoon.

Halfway through Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS, and it's fun and entertaining enough but I'm honestly a little surprised it's talked about as some great touchstone of sociocultural commentary and forward-thinking ideas. But perhaps I ought to wait until I finish it before jumping to any conclusions.

#radar #TV #film #reads

Someone at the conference took a jab at TRANSCENDENCE, a film I had never heard of and thus decided to watch despite its horrendous ratings.

I quite enjoyed it! It does falter terribly in the third act, but its first half is pretty darn good. It is almost certainly every delusional techno-optimist's wet dream; It isn't hard to picture our feudal tech overlords frothing at the mouth through most of it (it's even got a 2-second cameo of Musk). But, there is something there.

In other news, Xi Jinping landed in Egypt yesterday, a visit that was much publicized and can likely be taken as a clue of what's to come. Interesting times.

#radar #film

One of the great things about attending scholarly conferences—aside from all the really smart people you meet—is the treasure trove of book recommendations you get. Now adding to my tbr pile:

• GOLIATH — by Tochi Onyebuchi
• GRACE — by Barbara Boswell
• MUTE COMPULSION: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital — by Soren Mau
• MORE AND MORE AND MORE: An All-Consuming History of Energy — by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

That last one, I cannot even count the number of times it was mentioned or cited.

#radar #reads

Mark Millar interviewing Traves Charest is so great.

Downloaded Ian M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS on kindle for my travel reading, which I have embarrassingly yet to read. Even more embarrassing is that I haven't read any of The Culture novels, but they've been coming up enough in conversations for the past few years that it is high time.

Been a minute since I busted out the kindle, after having amassed a number of Arab-language paper books at the Cairo Book Fair earlier in the year. Last thing I read on the kindle was Walter Mosley's ARCHIBALD LAWLESS: ANARCHIST AT LARGE, which I really really loved.

#radar #reads

Koshary's kittens have all scurried off to explore the world, save for Tiger, who has decided to make the garden his domain. Curious, because he was the most avoidant of the lot. Now all of a sudden he's become an immensely affectionate little slut.

Amsterdam-based graphic designer Hans Gremmen has created over 400 books. While making these books, a miscellaneous pile kept growing in his studio: notes, sketches, photos, printed matter, screenshots, ephemera, and other breadcrumbs. ‘In Between’ is an attempt to deconstruct and re-organise this pile. The publication is a scrapbook about a hybrid design practice, but also a plea to consider failure as an option.

I would absolutely love to do something similar. I have an unruly amount of scraps, sketches, notes, process stuff, and photographs that I can absolutely see packaged and preserved in a similar way. Perhaps not in one big phonebook of a publication, but maybe an ongoing zine of sorts. A strange and regular rag that collects this stuff would absolutely work, given that such typically discarded material is likely to continue being a byproduct of the kind of work I do. Problem with that format is that it wouldn't sit on the shelf very well. But if each unit was in the hundred-page-range, you can give it a spine and make it work. A print-on-demand model might be a good option for this sort of thing.

Still, just the time it would take to gather this stuff and package it into a coherent and decent-enough design sounds like enough of a daunting sinkhole that I'm not sure I have the time for.

#journal #radar