Carrier Signal Jan 2024

Last post here: about 260 days ago. Talking about structure, flow, and processes (especially creative ones). I am still thinking about these things, which is good, but did not remember those specific thoughts, which was differently good.

I've been wanting to get back to mark-making on here for quite a while. I feel like I hobbled my way into the end of last year -- the whole back half of it, really -- without much in the way of spare capacity. So, I was thinking, but less (outside of the immediate thinking needed to do the things in front of me) than I like to.

I've been recovering a bit of that capacity lately -- and have been having the opposite problem, where I find stuff spiralling out of my brain because it's too 'full'. I had set aside some time to try to write up at least one of those, but may not, in fact, get to that today. It's been a full brain day.

This venue actually isn't *that* appropriate for a blog any more. I intend (at some mythical point where I have the time to effect it) to move off Squarespace (good, but too expensive as a recurring cost relative to what I need it for). But: it'll do for right now.

I'm wary of declaring my intent to get back to blogging and mark-making and then not doing so. I don't have a clear space for it in my routine right now, even as the urge has progressively built. So this is very much a carrier signal, or perhaps a dial tone. It creates the space for a message, communication, without requiring that it follow.

Status 3-Feb-23

Patchy blog this week. Some busy days, and one day out sick, and I've not quite been caught up enough today to spare the attention.

Please enjoy this quote about carnivorous vulture bees via The Whippet, which is a fabulous and interesting newsletter to which you should subscribe.

Via The Whippet 163:

Most bees have saddle bag–like structures on their legs for carrying pollen, but vulture bees have much smaller leg baskets, which they use for carrying meat back to their hives. ("They had little chicken baskets,” said Quinn McFrederick, a UCR entomologist.") To gather their hauls, vulture bees have a unique set of teeth they use to slice bits of meat. Once in the hive, the vulture bees store the meat chunks in small wax pots, leave them there for two weeks to cure, and then feed it to their larvae.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/carnivorous-vulture-bees-have-acidic-microbiomes-to-better-digest-their-carrion/

Ident 2023

Well, I'm back.

I am George Lockett. I'm a writer and maker of story things. Right now, I work for Failbetter Games on Fallen London and other things. More generally, I work on video games as a writer, narrative designer, and story consultant. I have also been known to run D&D on the internet.

These blogs are 'shards', which you can best think of as pages of an externalised personal notebook. What I write here are, more than anything, thought sketches -- little nuggets that are just me thinking on the page to try to tease out and develop what I think. Sometimes, that may be interesting. Other times, it may be banal or even tedious. I try to keep myself from second guessing.

As of right now, I plan to keep updating this every weekday where I can. This year, I'd like to move this blog to something a little more suitable for my current purpose than Squarespace, but that's a low-priority use of my attention.

If you read this blog and find it interesting -- or even if you just read it and want to wave, you can always leave a comment. This is ultimately for me, but it's nice to know if people are reading.

With a bow

That's 'bow', not 'bow'. Heh.

Patchy updates on here this week. A few longer posts, where I had more time and space to follow up a thought, and some gaps. My brain and body appear to have cast off slightly too many resources a bit too early -- this week has been an intense struggle as we come to the end of my working time for the year.

This blog is unlikely to be fully silent -- I've got a bunch of posts I want to finish up, some little things like a look back at some of the posts and interlinking from this year. But it certainly won't be on any kind of schedule.

If I have the energy and inclination for some gentle maintenance, I may look at some other ways of surfacing the content on here in other ways. Without looking, I'd guess most of the people reading these posts get here via Twitter, and I don't have an alternative to that right now. I want people to be able to get these via other means without checking in on the site or using email workarounds.

(Though reminder that there should be a few methods to have these posts come to you here.

In any case, it's been nice writing to you (and for me) this year. A quick survey of my folders suggests I've done 130 of these posts this year. Here's a snapshot of what the node graph of that looks like:

View fullsize

Within sight

I've missed a couple of days on here. It's cold (I don't remember it being -6 in London since I've lived here, but that could just be a failure of memory) and it's harder to get out of bed in the morning. I'm not quite at the point where I can properly wind down and try to stop thinking about work, but I'm certainly in sight of the border.

All of which is to say: I haven't gone yet. I'll probably cover the blog with a dust-sheet in about a week. I might post more stuff before the new year as the mood takes me, but it'll be quiet and intermittent for a while.

I've been toying with the idea of some ritual of laying down of tools for the year. But I haven't figured that out yet.

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In or before the new year, I also want to investigate some tech and hosting stuff. The mild friction of Squarespace for posting and referencing these blogs will be annoying if I keep doing it, and the lack of, say, RSS if I'm eventually going to ditch Twitter is also a limitation. I need to figure out what my social media presence is going to look like going forward, and how to handle hosting this blog. (I'm thinking of migrating my entire website off Squarespace. I'm not using enough of its features to justify an ongoing expense at that level, and while the initial time + pain is going to be real, I think it'll be worth it.)

(In case you missed it, the most fragile and transparently pathetic man in the world has started banning journalists from Twitter for violating a new rule he just made up, with such highlights as 'running another of his stupid polls to decide their unbanning fate', then being unhappy that 'now' won, so saying he was going to run it again (where 'now' is still winning). He is many things, but he is also: a massive and dangerous loser.)

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Kieron has some excellent 'player principles for better play' in his latest newsletter. Definitely worth a read if TTRPGs are your thing.

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There, this one is a grab-bag with more than three sections. That should make up for the lost days...

8 Minutes

I give myself about 8 minutes to write these posts. Not enough time, it must be said, to get into anything of substance. There are a bunch of things sitting in my ideas folder which I really want to get to, but which I know just can't be done in that amount of time. (Though perhaps breaking them into a series of small snapshots? We'll see.)

That time-box makes this work as a sort of 'morning pages', 'here's a thing in my brain right now' habit. Which does cut right to the intent of this blog (sketch out a thought each working day). But it does force things into a certain kind of box.

(I do actually give myself ~5 minutes or so to clean up the post and get it scheduled. But it's a case of 'what can I realistically get down in 8 minutes?')

My morning 'startup' routine works extremely well for me, though it can feel like a bit of a treadmill as well. I generally start my day job work at 9.30am. Prior to that:

• 8.30am I should be at my desk
• I spend up to 15 minutes working on my basic setup checklist (sorting my workspace, writing a paper schedule, spending at least a few minutes reading something, etc.). I set a timer for this.
• When I'm done with that, I add another 15 minutes to the timer and use that to run through my 'admin' routine.
• This means going through my main communications channels and replying where I can.
• Some days, there are some non-daily tasks like going through my email inboxes or my budget.
• Any leftover time has me dive into my Trello board of tasks and work down the list.
• THEORETICALLY I'm done with this by 9am.
• In practice, I often start a bit late, or have something that slightly overruns.
• I use a 'two minute heuristic' for that where practical -- 'can I finish this properly with two more minutes?' If so, do it, if not, just stash what you have for next time.
• Then I set a timer for 8 minutes, snag something from the folder if I don't have something in mind already, then write it.
• (Two minute heuristic still applies.)
• Then I set yet another timer to give me a box in which to read back over it -- briefly -- and get it scheduled on here.
• Then I go make coffee and have ten minutes or so to do whatever before I have to switch back on again.

This means there's not a lot of forward-planning for these shards. For instance, [I wrote about broadly this same thing back in May]|(https://www.georgelockett.com/shards/2022/5/11/morning-startup). But things change, thoughts drift, and you get what's on the top of my brain.

And there's the timer.

Oop! Crow!

I would really like to stop waking up exhausted this week. It's very rude.

(Okay, sidenote that for all that I am good at concentrating and avoiding distraction and procrastination -- not naturally, perhaps, but because I have many, many systems and much practice in making that happen when it otherwise wouldn't -- I give myself a specific carve-out for watching birds do interesting things. This post might be extra-truncated, is what I'm saying, because: there were some crows.)

Fortunately, I mostly just wanted to share this quote I really liked from Dan Hon:

There is no single player game, just in the same way that there is no single player and no single person ... there is no such thing as a single player game because so long as there are other people, there is always the chance that you will someday be able to talk to someone else about the game you played and maybe they will get to play it, too.

—Dan Hon, Things That Caught My Attention s13e20: What It Is Like To Be A Certain Kind Of Person

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Breaking the pattern for these posts slightly by bundling several unrelated things in one post, but: I've mostly stayed off Twitter this week, and plan to keep it that way. I've always gone through patches like this, because Twitter is a misery machine, but fairly obviously, the field of play is somewhat different this time. I did dip back on there briefly this morning, and as awful as it all is, seeing the way that the Blockhead-in-Chief is just absolutely piledriving this situation into the ground (I guess he knows a thing or two about digging holes) is very, very funny.

Whoop crows are back, gotta go.

Situation: Corvid

I actually wrote a blog yesterday which I never got round to scheduling/posting due to a 'corvid incident'.

We had to catch this regal-looking [scared witless and really hecking angry] lad yesterday. He's sick, possibly salmonella or something, with a drooping wing and very pale feathers. He can't fly for more than a metre or so (which is good only when it came to catching him).

We had to chase him for a very long time, herding him into trees and corners and trying not to get him (or us) run over by cars. In the end, we chased him in straight lines until he was too tired to run.

I feel intensely bad for him. Chasing a creature until it's so exhausted that it's throwing up is not nice. It also requires a weird balance of deeply caring for the creature [such that you're mad enough to want to do this in the first place] while also being a calculating predator [so you can actually catch the damn thing].

He was, apparently, unlikely to have survived winter out on his own. The rest of the crow flock here had ostracised him already. We have good relations with the crows, and we were worried about them turning on us after seeing essentially hunt one of their own. But they simply... did not care. They were actively soliciting us for peanuts while the chase was in progress.

I wish him well. If he makes it and returns, he'll probably never forgive us -- and, fair enough. But hopefully, he gets to stick around to hate us.

I'll stick yesterday's draft blog on schedule to post later.

Well-Worn Tools

Radio silence on here last week, as I was on an actual holiday. I'm bad at downtime and find travel disproportionately stressful, which does make me take less holiday and less advantage of holiday than perhaps I should, but this was very nice.

We were in Dubrovnik, right at the end of the season, which meant that, despite being half-term week, it was (comparatively) quiet. We got lucky with the weather. I don't think I would have particularly minded rain, as I don't holiday specifically for the sun, but we in fact had fortuitiously glorious weather all week.

I'm now sitting at my desk trying to brush the cobwebs off my brain. As much as I find it hard to switch into downtime and get my head out of work and routine and process, going back is hard, too (albeit less stressful than the threat of travel). There is comfort and power, for me, in routine and systems, and it eases the transition -- makes it more like picking up a favourite tool, the handle worn just into the right shape. It sits comfortably in the hand, but still feels a little heavier than you remember, and you worry, briefly, that you might have forgotten how to swing it. (You haven't.)

Time to start swinging.

August blog status

It's amazing how easy it can be to break a habit. I (rightly) took the week off this blog while on holiday. Last week was a little spotty, partly due to extrinsic reasons, but also due to the slight slipping of that habit. I was busy and head-deep in a bunch of different work and work-adjacent things, plus still trying to ramp back out of holiday mode, and it set up a higher barrier to entry to getting thoughts down for this.

Flash forward to today, and that's had a compounding effect. I'm feeling much more energetic than last week, but still, this feels tricky. Somewhere between a chore and something I don't quite have time to do.

(I am pleased that my brain is back in better shape so far this week vs the last few. This bodes additionally well since I will be reintroducing caffeine soon. I've definitely found myself having more 'off' days without the synthetic mental pep it gives. Which is something for continual examination (and part of the point of the exercise to begin with), but certainly something that will benefit me.)

August saw 19 posts on here. That should make this shard #78. By visual inspection, the posts with most connections are:

Ways of Being
Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units
What are we really talking about
A Chain of Thoughts on Fiction-First TTRPGs vs D&D
Legibility of life
Layers of Rules
Going low noise

This refers to cross-linking between post, not any kind of external backlinking or traffic measurement. In theory, these are the most joined-up parts of my thinking for this blog, and the things I keep referring back to. My method of arriving at this list isn't particularly scientific, and it looks at raw linking numbers rather than strictly backlinks. But it's interesting to see the ideas which have 'floated' the most in this way.

New Story: The Faces of Ghosts

I skipped yesterday's blog for uhhh obvious reasons. Not as a mark of respect, or anything like that, but because my planned post was a self-promo thing which just seemed guaranteed to get lost and be mostly a waste of time.

Anyway, here's a self-promo thing!

My flash fiction piece The Faces of Ghosts was published yesterday over on Uncharted Magazine.

Go read the story!

This one has always been a favourite of mine. It's creepy, and technological, and from very much what I would call my 'rejected Black Mirror plots' phase of stories. I wrote it first in 2017. I think it was, actually, the second story that I wrote that year, which was when I actually started taking writing seriously and trying to do a lot of it and work really intentionally to improve. Which, y'know, is going fine.

I've revised it about half a dozen times since then. It's been doing the rounds on submissions for much of that time, and every time I thought about just putting it out somewhere myself, I'd read back over it and go 'no, this is still actually good' [with some small number of revisions]. It did actually sell some time in late 2018, to a magazine that closed shortly thereafter (I got paid, and the rights reverted, which was some consolation, but I really just wanted to see it published.)

I wouldn't write the same story now, for better and worse. It has something of the 'vignette' nature to it that a lot of my early attempts at writing did -- where I had an engaging idea and largely forged ahead to try to write the idea without the nuts-and-bolts craft work to developing the idea, the world and characters around it. I think it succeeds well enough in spite of that, partly by accident.

I wouldn't approach a piece in the same way now, but I think parts of my limitations there also helped the story a bunch incidentally -- particularly in the way it cuts so close to the core of the idea and doesn't waste any time. Perversely, I don't always have the same clarity and confidence then as now.

I was going to make the title of this post my favourite line from the story, but then I thought about how, uh, wonky that might appear showing up on Twitter right now. So you get it here instead:

She only lived once, but she has died many times. I have buried her many times.

Blood, stones, and water

I was on holiday last week, a thing I recommend. I wouldn't say that I have returned with a huge surfeit of energy, but I did relax, and it has helped me already make different prioritisation decisions around work. Which included skipping writing a blog yesterday because I had too much else going on and was otherwise too tired. And making this one short and reflective for much the same reason.

We canoed over an aqueduct (whose stones are infused with ox blood). Climbed a hill to a castle. Saw a crow. Good times.

Ceci n'est pas une post

No post today, as I am sick. Updates will resume tomorrow, or else next week.

Blog Status July 2022

I've been keeping this blog for closing on 2.5 months now (first post was April 26th). It started out more ad hoc, then targeting three posts a week; now, I aim for one post per working day. This should be the 40th post.

In my first post, 'On Microblogging', I said this would be

Somewhere for me to put out smaller, singular posts with, honestly, less filter and polish. That's key for me -- the further I get into editing or second-guessing what to put, the greater the activation energy to actually getting any posts out, ever. So I leave filtering as an exercise for the reader.
...
Sometimes, I need to turn my brain inside out and shake it. That's not always going to be advisable or pretty, but it's certainly An Image. ... This, as ever, is more for me than anyone else

All of this still holds true, but I put it more succinctly in a later post

In keeping with the nature of this blog, they're not meant to be finished, polished artefacts. I'm thinking of them more as 'thought sketches' -- a way for me to reflect roughly on the project as much as to surface anything externally.

I think 'thought sketches' is exactly the right way of describing what I post here. I'm toying with the idea of distinguishing between those and doing more polished posts intermittently, but I don't feel I have the bandwidth or workflow for that right now.

Maintaining this blog has been good training of the mental muscles -- striking a balancing of finding something to think about on the page each day, and getting better at making a thought sketch more like an actual thing (without losing the sense of roughness that constitutes a sketch). I guess: even if your intended output is a rough sketch, if you do lots of them, what constitutes 'rough' for you should, in theory, decline over time.

In keeping with the exercise, I've avoided drafting multiple posts ahead of time. That would be more time-efficient, but remove the element of practice that this is meant to provide. Given that goal, if it becomes too much burden to find time for this daily, it would instead be better to cut back the number of posts in a given period, rather than trying to 'batch' my work on it.

Acolyte is Out Now!

It's a good month for 'games I worked on' coming out. Acolyte from Superstring is a technological conspiracy story leaning on conversational AI, with ARG puzzle elements. (Trying saying that quickly, well, one time.) I wrote a bunch of Ana's dialogue, plus designed most of the ARG puzzles and associated content, which was an exceptionally fun thing to do.

You can pick up Acolyte on Steam!

Shard Frequency and Post Notifications

I've shifted my intent for this blog slightly, so I'm trying to get a post written and out every weekday, rather than M/W/F. I may regret this and dial it back down, but I'm finding the exercise extremely gainful, and that higher frequency supports rather than hampers this. Making it that level of routine helps enforce the purpose of the blog, which is get thoughts out of my head -- advancing them slightly, but without setting myself unreasonable standards of development and polish which stifle me [in this context].

I find that, pursuant to some of Matt Webb's 15 rules for blogging, capturing ideas immediately and then, when it's time to write, working on whichever one has the most currency/appeal to what I'm thinking about, is transformative. I generate ideas routinely and amply, so there's -- for now -- always a surplus. Following the path of the lightning towards whatever's most on mind also makes it so that it doesn't feel like particular effort or work -- just a matter of finding that small amount of time required to get the words out in the right order.

Anyway, since I can't set up email alerts or anything on my current blog setup, I thought I'd throw out a few ways you can keep on top of what I'm posting here, if you're so inclined.

1) Follow me on Twitter @mastergeorge. I've set it up to tweet out a new post whenever one goes live.

2) Plug https://www.georgelockett.com/shards?format=rss into your RSS reader

3) Use IFTT to set up your own email alerts from the RSS. Thanks to Olivia for figuring this one out. Here are her instructions:

• https://ifttt.com/
• I already had an account, but if you don't have one you need to create one. You get 5 free triggers before you have to upgrade.
• Using the 'Create' button, click 'Add' on IF THIS.
• Search the services for RSS and click on the orange RSS feed it'll bring up.
• Click 'New Feed Item'
• Add: https://www.georgelockett.com/shards?format=rss into the Feed URL box.
• Press 'Create trigger'
• This takes you to a page where you can then press 'Add' on 'Then that'.
• Search for 'Email', click on Email (rather than Email digest).
• Then click on 'Send me an Email'.
• You can just press 'Create Action' on the next page, or add something like 'George's Brain:' to the beginning of the 'Subject' section, so you're reminded where the feed is pulling from when you get the email. (Press 'Create Action'.)
• Then press 'Continue'.
• On 'Review and Finish' press Finish and you're done.

On Microblogging

A collision of a few different threads all hitting at once:

1) My newsletter limps along; I find it hard to make the time to turn out something I'm happy with. (Specifically: my energy and focus on a particular idea are almost always directly mismatched with the time available I have where I try to make myself write letters.)
2) During the pandemic in particular, I've spent too much time in conversation with myself and not enough with other people. This leads to too many open mental loops and is not good for my brain more generally.
3) Warren Ellis has been ticking over his Morning Computer updates again. Whatever your view of him, I've always found his practices and intentionality interesting and informative.
4) I came across these 15 rules for blogging, the structure of which resonated with me.
5) Twitter was already a Bad Place, but it's not getting any better anytime soon.

Which leads me to this: a microblog. Somewhere for me to put out smaller, singular posts with, honestly, less filter and polish. That's key for me -- the further I get into editing or second-guessing what to put, the greater the activation energy to actually getting any posts out, ever. So I leave filtering as an exercise for the reader.

There's an image that's stuck with me from years ago: A street on which I used to live had a sort of mini-fair where all the shops and cafés set up outside on the street for the day. It gave the strange sense that the shops had been everted -- that someone had opened up the doors and shaken them out onto the street. Tables, little ovens, bar furniture that really shouldn't be seen in daylight.

Sometimes, I need to turn my brain inside out and shake it. That's not always going to be advisable or pretty, but it's certainly An Image.

This, as ever, is more for me than anyone else, though I'm just arrogant enough to think that there will be something that somebody finds worth reading in each of these.