Weather’s changed and there’s now a definite sense that Autumn’s begun. It’s cooler – almost cold – and darker during the day and we’re experiencing sudden showers. By the end of the week the children were both back at school (fairly happily, which is a relief) and I’m getting to grips with how things seem to be for me at the moment. The week has included some end of school holiday tidying and organisation. It’s alarming how much I loose track of time and find myself looking back over the days wondering where all my time has gone). Weirdly, I’m beginning to realise that waking at around three in the morning is more than a temporary thing now; it has to be a marker of aging (and, more than likely, a reason I’m feeling exhausted around 9 o’clock in the evening). I’m not reading nearly enough. We played a LONG family game of Munchkin – and the next day that we got some of the rules wrong which caused the game to go about five times longer than it should have done.

 Fiction I read

• The Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud (started).
• Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (still reading)

Non-fiction I read

• Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh.
• Uniquely Human
• Sinister Forces

Comics I read

• 2000AD prog 2398 – continually excellent.
• Flash Gordon Quarterly #1
  
• Exceptional X-Men #1
• Brzrkr #1-12 – Started strongly then tapers off. I wanted to read this before starting the China Mieville novel. Ron Garney’s art is great and I’m sure that Matt Kindt did the best he could with the scripts but I think that Reeves wanted a deeper, metaphysical ending which, for me, didn’t really work.

Online texts I read (and thought about)

A Complete Person by Jay Springett

• Very thoughtful piece – as all Springett’s writing is – about cutting off noise from social media platforms (to “prune and refine my digital landscape”) and expresses how social media is far too “fleeting” and lacks “depth and permanence”:

I’ve managed to extract myself from the clutches of social media and learned not to have an oversized emotional reaction to things happening in the wider world that I can do nothing about. Maybe this is just getting older, but it’s been a six-year process of figuring out where I stand and who I am in relation to this vast semiotic megastructure that is culture.

TV and Movies I watched

• Ancient Aliens – I watched one episode (honestly!) and only because it featured Jacques Valee. It was filled with repetitive bombast! Terrible.
• Jordskott – Finished the first season of this Swedish supernatural police drama. Yes, I enjoyed it when it wasn’t chasing its own tail.
• The Watchers – A movie that takes itself far more seriously than it should. Vast forests in Ireland that aren’t on any map?

Music I listened to

• Loula Yorke’s September Mixtape – wonderful start of each month.
• Hildegard von Bingen – after listening to Laura Cannell’s The Ritual’s of Hildegard Reimagined and reading a fascinating New Yorker piece about her, I’ve been listening through what I have of Hildegard’s music and building a playlist. (I prefer the instrumental work, if I’m honest).

Podcasts, audiobooks and audio dramas I listened to

• Temporal – I’ve listened to the first (of six) parts of Julian Simpson’s new audio drama. Simpson is without question one of my favourite writers.
• The Final Beginning – Second Doctor audiodrama set between War Games and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. David Troughton performs the role his father played flawlessly. I REALLY enjoyed this.
• The Department of Midnight #3: Song to the Siren – Third episode of Warren Ellis’ short audiodramas starring James Callis as a science/paranormal investigator. This episode is a weird crime that has taken place in a locked room.
• Žižek And So On podcast – excellent interview with Anna Kornbluh on her book Immediacy. Kornbluh seems a brilliant thinker.
• Scriptnotes podcast – interview with Ryan Reynolds about his involvement with the creation and scriptwriting of the Deadpool movies. Reynolds comes across as a genuinely nice human being.
• William Ramsey Investigates podcast – 2019 interview with Tom Mellet about Peter Levenda, Hal Puthoff and Jacques Vallée in early ufology.