Cartoon Gravity 45

Yes, I'm still calling the newsletter Cartoon Gravity, which was a last-minute decision, but I don't want to sunset the name completely.

It has been a while, so we might as well cover everything...

As promised, the Cartoon Gravity site has become Pure Hokum, but very little else has changed. It's a reorganisation that might only really make sense to me, but it brings my company and my personal website together in one place, because I don't see much division between them. As Derek Sivers writes, there is no law that says that your company can't be an extension of your personality. There is nothing very "corporate" about Pure Hokum - it's a place where I make up stories and figure out what to do with them - it doesn't have to exist outside of the kind of nonsense we talk about here. Quite the opposite, I find that the nonsense here and the nonsense there tend to complement each other.

One other bracing change involves our private social network, which used to be called the Cartoon Gravity Club and has now been re-christened The Pendragon Club. The Pendragon is an in-world institution that will be heavily featured in the next season of the Lovecraft Investigations, so I thought it would be fun to mirror it in the real (virtual) world too.

Other than that, it's business as usual here, or getting back to it. I'm sure there will be the odd glitch caused by these changes, but I'll deal with them as they arrive.

It has been a weird few months. The crowdfund for the new Lovecraft Investigations season went staggeringly well, but was a pretty intense period of work. The funds raised, after books, CDs, T-shirts, merch (and the show itself) have been made will set Pure Hokum up for a while which, in the absence of anything profitable happening in the larger world of TV and film, is a Godsend. I've written about this before, so I won't retread that ground, but successfully launching a boot-strapped, community-backed, storytelling company feels like a real achievement, even if not every aspect of what that means for the future has entirely sunk in yet.

The long and short of it is that I own my stories and characters and I can finance audio shows, and maybe TV and film in the future, by selling direct to fans. No studio, no middle-people, no loss of rights. In the creative industry, that is the very definition of freedom, and I seem to have stumbled sideways into a great position.

And so now life returns to a semblance of normality. The big job ahead of me is writing and making the new series. In days of yore, this was a relatively low-paid gig that I had to schedule around the jobs that paid the bills. Now it is the job that pays the bills and I can devote all my time to it. That feels quite weird, to be honest, but I'm looking forward to getting used to it.

Immediately after the crowdfund ended, I legged it to Paris for a week to just get away from everything. I couldn't have known when I booked the trip, but this was the week that Paris hit 40 degrees. I was in a (gorgeous) 4th floor apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis that had no air-conditioning and just a single small desk fan on a very short power cable. If the temperature in that apartment dipped below 42 degrees the whole time I was there, I would be surprised. So the week of relaxation I planned turned into a week of no sleep and no real comfort.

Paris was hot and it smelled and it was dirty and I still came away thinking it's the best place on Earth. Despite the heat, I did a lot of walking, and worked through some ideas for the new season, as well as cementing the structure of a new movie I want to write, the story of which springs out of an incident that will be investigated in the new series.

By the time I got back from Paris I was, I think, suffering from mild heat exhaustion, and so I have been taking it pretty easy since I returned.

Mid-week, I attended a small pub-gathering organised by some members of the Pendragon Club, which re-affirmed my conviction that this community is really special and that the flow of information and inspiration between creator and fan-base can be really fruitfully bi-directional. Around a table in a very old pub in St James's were a physicist, a cyber-security expert, a singing teacher, a free church minister, a member of the civil service and a gemologist. They were brought together by their enthusiasm for the audio shows, but any one of them is more valuable to me as a resource and sounding board than I could ever be to them.

I have no idea if our fan base is unusual in its make-up, but I know that too often "fans" are lumped together as an amorphous entity that must be "serviced" but should be kept distant. I do think there is a real danger for creators in "giving the fans what they want" and thereby not innovating or taking risks, and I have seen lots of projects suffer as a result. But the "more of the same" approach does the fanbase a disservice.

If you're a creator, in any medium, your fanbase is the people who like the thing that you do more than anyone else. That makes them an asset, not just in terms of furthering success, but in terms of genuine collaboration. If that small group in the pub this week represents a cross-section of the Pure Hokum fanbase, then that is an incredible resource. Our community has already thrown up artists and tech-experts and designers and business people who have helped out on the shows and on the crowdfunding and I am, frankly, loathe to now look outside of this community for expertise - if I have questions about physics or theology or diamonds or tech or the inner-workings of government or vocal technique for actors, why not ask the people who already have a vested interest, and who, crucially, already understand the context of the questions?

If Pure Hokum is going to flourish, it's going to do so as a community, not as a corporate entity that seeks to cynically exploit its fanbase.

The Current App-Stack

If we're going to go business-as-usual (and it has been a while), I think it's time to look at the current app stack, don't you? Here's how it looks today:

Ulysses is still running point for prose (like this newsletter). Occasionally I think I ought to be using IA Writer for its ruthless minimalism, but that notion never survives contact with reality.

Talking of Notion, I'm back using that to keep the crowdfunding on schedule. I was using Airtable for a while (and I'm still transitioning), but I just know Notion very well and I'm comfortable there.

Arc Studio is the screenwriting app that I have been using almost exclusively for a while now. Highland Pro just kept falling over and I lost faith in it.

Obsidian is my main notes app. I try to escape quite regularly, but it keeps pulling me back simply because the cost of migrating thousands of notes is huge. I don't love Obsidian any more, but I think I'm stuck there.

Superlist is the big new addition. Having played with every kind of task manager there is, I have abandoned all of them for a simple, easy, lists app that just does what I need it to do without any fuss. I have a system I employ that seems to be making this pretty bullet-proof, but I'll tell you about that another time.

Aeon Timeline has been dusted off to help me set the events of the new Lovecraft Investigations season in order. This app just goes from strength to strength and I don't think I'm using a quarter of its capabilities.

Vivaldi is my browser of choice, partly through an effort to get away from the US tech hegemony as much as possible (from this list, only Notion and Hey, I think, are US products). Vivaldi took some getting used to, but it's very good.

Hey is my e-mail client. I recently tried Fast Mail, which is very good, but Hey pips it for usability and it allows all my various email domains to flow into one inbox with minimal friction.

Claude Cowork - Yes, yes, I know AI is evil etc. But if I want to create shows at the same time as I'm managing manufacture and delivery of dozens of crowdfund items, then something has to give. AI is terrible at creative endeavours, but it can process a spreadsheet like no one's business, and crowdfunding generates a LOT of spreadsheets. Being able to say "Compile a list of all EU-based backers who are receiving physical product and format it per the requirements of the fulfilment company" saves an admin-novice like me at least half a day's work and a lot of headaches.

The App Stack aside, I am finding that my single most productive tool is the Paper Republic Trifold. Within this, I have two plain notebooks, one for regular notes, one for the new Lovecraft Investigations season, and a Dojo System book, which functions as a bullet journal. That whole bundle is wrapped with a Midori Book Band Pen Case, which holds a Sailor 1911 fountain pen, a Drehgriffel pencil, a small Midori ruler, and a Drehgriffel pen loaded with a Uniball Jestream refill. With that little lot in my bag, there is really nothing I can't get done.

Recommendations

Movies - "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is a movie that did not get the attention it deserved but is a phenomenal piece of work. The Lost Bullet trilogy - "Lost Bullet", "Lost Bullet 2" and "Last Bullet" - is a really fun series of French crime movies that lie somewhere between "Rebel Ridge" and "John Wick". The effects are all physical (as far as I can tell), the fight scenes are some of the best I've ever seen, and the movies continue one story over three instalments. They're tight, breathless and clearly made by people who care.

I was also charmed by "Wing Women" (a horrible translation of the French title "Les Voleuses"). It's not without its flaws, but I really enjoyed it.

Books - "The Moon's a Balloon" by David Niven. This was on every dad's bookshelf when I was a kid, but I only got around to reading it last week. It promises a Hollywood memoir, but what it actually delivers is an incredible story of school expulsions, military service, the Second World War, and moments of genuine tragedy, blended with humour and affectionate, intimate portraits of some of the biggest movie stars in history. Niven writes brilliantly and this book is as much a chronicle of the Twentieth Century as it is an autobiography.

Music - Phoebe Bridgers has a new single out, and that is all you need to know:

If you haven't had more than enough of me by now, Gregg Stockdale interviewed me for Podcast Geek here.

Fuck it. Send.