Subscribe!My energy levels have been flatlined for more than a week at this point. I've not been getting up to much beyond watching television and reading books. I'm currently reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book on creativity, Big Magic and yesterday I watched her TED talk on the subject from 2009 (which is worth watching just for her anecdote about Tom Waits). I've been taking advantage of my Apple TV subscription a lot, particularly since I discovered the 2021 series Watch The Sound which is presented by Mark Ronson. Yesterday I watched the episode about reverb, and for a production nerd like me it was a delight. The disused oil storage tanks at Inchindown (the most reverberant physical space ever discovered) featured heavily, of course. And quite right too. But I won't be shelling out on the professional-level recreation of the tank's reverberant quality which featured on the show just yet; not after I discovered how much it costs. Instead I'll stick with the impulse responses (IRs) which Professor Trevor Cox posted on Freesound.org which work very nicely with Max For Live's Convolution Reverb Pro in Ableton, which I've been using for many years.
Nathan Pyle's Strange Planet is a lot of fun, too. I'm less sure about the adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation because the writers have taken it upon themselves to deviate wildly from the source material and that never ends well. I've not bothered to watch any more episodes of For All Mankind yet, either. But my favourite show on the channel so far has to be Monarch: Legacy of Monsters which is an absolute hoot. Wyatt and Kurt Russell playing young and old versions of the same character is an inspired bit of casting and the special effects are pretty top notch.
Last night I fired up the ARTE app on my television and watched Nils Frahm at the Philharmonie de Paris once again. Every time I watch it, I spot something I hadn't noticed before and there's all sorts of vintage gear to drool over (aside from a truly ridiculous number of Roland Space Echos there's a Roland SH-02, a TR-808, a Juno-6, three (!) Juno-60s, a Mellotron, a Model-D Minimoog, and a Fender Rhodes Stage Seventy Three electric piano as well as a vintage harmonium and a glass armonica). The music is transcendently beautiful and after watching his performance intently several times I'm even beginning to figure out what he was doing to get the sounds that I was hearing.
I've come close to watching more television in the past week than I have in the rest of this year put together and I was amazed to discover that I have actually enjoyed doing so. And no, I haven't forgotten about Severance; I'm working up to it.
I did not have "the Pope dying" on my Easter bingo card for this year, that's for sure. If the Vatican's marketing board were going to pick a day for it to happen (no, I'm not suggesting that they really did), I'm sure they would have put Easter Monday somewhere pretty close to the top of the list...
As you can see from the revised banner at the top of the page, I have a new album out. I've decided to release the songs I wrote last weekend when I had a go at the 20-song Game on my Bandcamp page.
As these are all unpolished, first pass demo versions of songs they are available as a pay-what-you-want deal. You don't have to pay for them if you don't want to (but it would be nice if you did, of course).
Once again I'm feeling a little better today, which is a relief. I did almost nothing yesterday beyond taking a nap in the afternoon, reading books and magazines, and attending a couple of listening parties on Bandcamp. The amount of pain I'm in today isn't limiting my mobility like it was a couple of days ago, so I hope I'm on the mend.
A friend of mine is playing music at The Plough a bit later, so I might wander down to show a bit of support. I couldn't have managed that on Friday.
Being ill sucks.
My pain levels continued to rise this week and by yesterday they'd got to what I'd class as 8/10 (they usually sit at 3 or 4). It wasn't a good Friday by any criteria I could think of at all and I had an absolutely miserable day. I couldn't do very much of anything beyond a bit of cooking and I headed back to bed in the afternoon because lying down didn't hurt as much. But I made sure to drink plenty of fluids, and that seems to have helped. This morning I'm glad to say that things have improved quite a bit. It didn't hurt to get out of bed, for a start.
And I just got out of a chair without having to think about whether the pain involved was going to make it worthwhile doing so, so I think we can safely conclude that things aren't as bad as they were yesterday.
Despite feeling terrible I managed to start work on a new album this week. And with one track already completed, the spreadsheet that I use to keep a "songwriting tally" of my output now stands at a whopping 1,480 songs. I aim to hit 1,500 before I head off to Real World again next month, because (a) it feels achievable, particularly as I'm going to be taking part in another 20-song game challenge before then and (b) when it comes to bragging rights, nice round numbers are the best. I haven't discovered any deep secret to being as prolific as this. It's simply that making music makes me happy and for most of the time at least it's an effective distraction from feeling ill and the wider state of the world. I just switch on my gear and go to work.
I think the MOTU 828 is now nicely settled in to my studio setup. I had to adjust gain levels for inputs and monitoring quite a bit, possibly because I'm now using XLR cables as inputs instead of quarter-inch jacks, but the results have been sounding very good.
This month's 20-song game helped iron out the last few wrinkles, but it also got me thinking about my process. In particular, the idea of being able to get the technology out of the way of the music is something that I'm seeing from a different perspective; I used to think that writing four tracks in a day was the limit of my productivity and it's been nearly a decade since I did that, but now that I've managed to create fourteen in twelve hours that's clearly not the case any longer.
So, why is that? Just having another nine years' production experience doesn't feel plausible as the only reason why I should be able to do so so much faster or why (IMHO) I get better results these days. Other things are involved.
For a start, the technology that I'm using today has more functionality, it reproduces what I do more accurately, and it's more reliable. The most obvious example of this is the pair of Focal monitors which I bought back in 2022, which have made a huge difference to how analytical I can be about my sound. I realised during FAWM this year that I can trust my ears a lot more these days; that's stopped all the faffing about with presets for compression and eq and what have you that I used to have to go through before I got results that sounded okay to me (and when I go back and listen to stuff that I was doing back in 2016 or so, my judgment on what sounded good really wasn't that reliable). As a result of all this, now I can trust myself to make recordings that I'll still be happy with a month later. That means I'm no longer consciously thinking about that side of things and distracting myself from the craft.
I reckon the technical quality of what I do is more or less sorted for the time being, so now I need to focus on the music itself. I've made some progress—I've learned to recognise the sort of arrangements that used to lead me down dead ends or which would result in a piece of music that would almost immediately leave me feeling disappointed or embarrassed—but not enough of it. So far, most of that improvement has come from learning what to never do again, from the occasional tracks that went disastrously and painfully wrong.
My songwriting chops might be better than they were ten years ago but I've made little or no effort to improve that side of the art. Even a simple learning point like discovering that I get better results when I write the lyrics first and then set them to music hasn't gone in and stuck. My opinion of my own work these days is that most of what I'm producing is "okay", but very little of it approaches the quality that I want to achieve. Not enough of it is "good" and I'm not achieving the standards I should be achieving often enough, let alone consistently.
I'm not paying enough attention to what I want to say, or how I want to say it. I've always been a dedicated literalist; imagery and metaphor have never been my strong suits. Frankly, my writing isn't at all subtle although I can come up with the occasional decent gag. I jump in and see what happens, rather than thinking about what sort of mood I want to achieve beforehand. If there's ever any subtext in my work, you can safely assume that I wasn't consciously aware of its existence at the time. It's well past time that all this changed, even if I'm not at all sure how I'm going to achieve that yet. What I'm aiming for from now on is for me to hear a significant improvement in the aesthetic quality of what I'm writing. That should arguably have been my priority in the first place, but (a) I've always been an inveterate production nerd and (b) I have much less of an idea how one goes about doing so. After all, it's taken me nearly two decades of hard work before I could determine that this is what I need to do. It's going to be interesting hearing what sort of stuff I end up making from this point onwards...
I enthused about the Pocket Master guitar gadget that I bought back in January enthusiastically enough that my buddy Paul bought one, and this week he popped round so I could help him set it up properly (get it talking to his Macbook, update the firmware, and make a backup of the patches on it) and go through the basics of editing the sounds it makes. He was soon off and running, and now he's as much of a convert as I am!
A team from Cambridge University using the James Webb Space Telescope has announced a three-sigma result for detecting "abundant" molecules of dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS) in the atmosphere of a planet with the catchy name of K2-18b which is in a solar system some 38 parsecs (124 light years) away from Earth. It orbits its parent star (K2-18, a.k.a. EPIC 201912552 is an M dwarf or red dwarf that is smaller and cooler than our sun) every 33 days. Such stars are very long-lived, but they have other characteristics that make the chances of any planets which are orbiting them in the star's so-called "habitable zone" being capable of supporting life very remote.
K2-18b has been hitting the headlines, because one way that a planet can end up with significant quantities of those two chemicals being present (DMS is a colourless, flammable liquid and so is DMDS) is if they're being exuded by algae and bacteria as well as other biological organisms. Sufficient quantities of these chemicals in the planet's atmosphere would make the place reek of cabbages and garlic. Pleasant, eh?
There are chemical processes that generate these molecules without organic life being involved. A three-sigma result isn't good enough for the detection to be regarded as definite. But you've probably already realised that the news media won't be bothering with subtle nuances like that. And if you did, you were bang on the money. And notice how few of those stories get the details I've given above like the planet's distance, its size, or the properties of the chemicals concerned even remotely correct. And then consider how accurate most other news reporting is likely to be...
A research team using ESA's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has discovered a planet that's going to go into the reference books as the weirdest known to science. It orbits a pair of suns (so you're immediately thinking of Tattooine, aren't you?) but its orbit does not lie in the same plane as that of its binary stars. Instead, it loops around them in an orbit that's at right angles to them.
Polar planetary disks are stable, and several have already been seen around distant stars (and I still get a kick out of living in a time when technology allows astronomers to make a statement like that) but this is the first time a planet has been observed in such an orbit.
I've spent most of the morning so far imagining what the view would be like from the surface of a planet like that. Pretty wild, I'l bet.
With the upcoming adaptation of Martha Wells's excellent Murderbot books about to arrive on Apple TV+ and the trailer looking like the series is going to be the best new thing on television this year, I concluded that whether I liked it or not I was going to have to take out a subscription to Apple's streaming channel. Yesterday I noticed that they were offering three months' subscription for a reduced rate of £3 a month to new sign-ups, so I signed up.
And that meant that I didn't get round to doing anything all yesterday evening beyond sitting on the sofa watching the first episodes of For All Mankind (which is weird, but I'm reserving judgment on it for the moment), Foundation (which looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous, but it's much more explodey than I remember Isaac Asimov's book being) and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (which was so much fun that I watched the second episode as well, and would probably have cruised on to a third had it not been bedtime).
The thing about the service that immediately struck me right between the ears was the fact that the soundtrack of each show I watched was in Dolby Atmos immersive audio. Very little of the content I've encountered so far over on Disney+ has been in Atmos. Instead, it's usually in old school 5.1 surround and the contrast with the Apple shows is striking.
Unfortunately the audio on Apple TV+ regularly cuts out completely for a second or two, which is profoundly irritating. I need to do some digging to see if there are any settings on my TV or router that might be causing the problem...
The curry I made was a success, and I've got nine portions of it left in the freezer. Sunday's debrief of the 20-song game was fascinating as well as being great fun and we've agreed that the three of us are going to have another go at it again next month. Yes, I've changed my mind about only having the energy to do this two or three times a year. I agreed because I'd updated my spreadsheet keeping track of the number of songs that I've recorded since I signed up for FAWM and discovered that I'm just 21 songs away from having written 1,500 of the things. I've set myself the goal of hitting that number before my next visit to Real World Studios, and another 20-song game should get me most (if not all) of the way there.
But for the past couple of days I've been feeling very sorry for myself. My pain levels escalated significantly (sitting in the studio for twelve hours at a stretch on Saturday, and another six on Sunday will have had a lot to do with that) and I've had a string of lousy nights because a couple of paracetamol tablets barely takes the edge off things any more. So since Monday I've ended up doing little more than reading (I'm now half way to my annual target of reading and reviewing sixty books before the end of the year) and watching television (yesterday I watched the final episode of Lower Decks and I find myself feeling cheated that they only got to make fifty episodes when The Next Generation ran for 178 and Deep Space Nine got 176...)
I feel slightly better today. Maybe this has been brought on by the change in weather; the persistent region of high pressure which was sitting over the country has finally collapsed and last night it rained here for the first time in well over a month. It brought the earthworms out, and from the footage I've just reviewed from the trail camera in the back garden, my hedgehogs were taking full advantage of that. I'm not planning on doing very much for the rest of the week, though. With the Easter weekend coming up, the roads will be busy and I'm glad I don't have to be anywhere else but right here.
Yesterday I found myself watching Danny Sapko's video about a guitarist called Giacomo Turra who has a lot of followers on Instagram, and the more I heard comparisons between his videos and those by other, less media-savvy guitarists whom he appears to have meticulously copied note for note (without giving any credit to the original composers), the more disgusted I became. I don't know what can be classed as plagiarism in music performance, but this seems to be a pretty clear-cut example to me. Whether this is so or not, as far as I'm concerned it's absolutely unacceptable behaviour.
Several of the companies with whom he had sponsorship deals seem to have agreed with me; Yahoo News reports that he's no longer listed on the artist pages on the websites of D'Angelico Guitars or Laney amplifiers and the UK music retailer Andertons have removed their interview with him from their YouTube channel. I don't think the repercussions of that video have finished landing yet, either, because one guitarist after another has been chiming in with their takes on what's going on. Danny recently posted an update summarising some of these further allegations. As Jack Gardiner explains in the second of those links, Turra was even making money by selling his transcriptions of Jack's solo without crediting him or paying him. Now, the YouTube algorithm loves a good controversy, of course—because that's what gets the big viewing numbers—so I expect that even more appraisals of Mr Turra's actions will be popping up in my feed for the next month or so.
If you've been reading my book reviews here, you may remember that late last year I read Karl Coryat and Nicholas Dobson's The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook and enthused about the book's central idea: a creative exercise they had developed known as The 20-song game. Think of it as being an extreme version of February Album Writing Month. Rather than taking the whole of February to write fourteen songs, the idea is to set aside a single, twelve-hour period of uninterrupted work in order to write twenty songs. I really enjoyed the Handbook and enthused enough about it in FAWM's Slack workspace that several other FAWMers went out and got a copy, including our FAWMer in chief, Burr Settles.
And a few weeks ago, Burr asked me if I'd like to take part in a small experiment to see if the 20-song game was applicable to the sort of way that FAWMers approach their songwriting.
A science experiment? About songwriting? Of course I said yes.
What I agreed to do was to take part in a 20-song game run for a small group of FAWM die-hards. It's one thing to read books about techniques for improving your songwriting game but it doesn't matter how many new approaches you collect about the subject, they aren't going to do you any good until you have a go at them for yourself. And so after I'd finished my breakfast yesterday, I headed into my home recording studio, fired up all my gear, noted the time, and set to work.
Aside from taking one short break after three hours to eat a pork pie and have a mug of tea, and a slightly longer one after six hours at teatime for pizza, I spent the rest of the day in the studio chair, beavering away on new music. I didn't leave the studio once for the last six hours of the session.
At half past eleven at night, I stopped the clock and slumped back in my chair, utterly exhausted. I hadn't written twenty songs. I hadn't even made it to fifteen. But I did have demos of fourteen completely new songs in a folder on my studio PC. Somehow I'd managed to complete the equivalent of FAWM in just twelve hours. As songs go, they're not complex, or potential hits—not yet, anyway. But I was surprised at the level of quality I was able to maintain when I was averaging less than an hour on each piece. They're good enough to put out as an album, and I plan on doing just that for next month's Bandcamp Friday. Later today I'll be taking part in a Zoom call where all the participants will play back the songs they made and we'll listen to each other's work and give feedback on what we've heard. I'm really excited about taking part. It'll be fun and I can't wait to hear what my fellow lab rats have come up with.
Today I feel absolutely wired, in much the same way as I did when I got home from the masterclass at Real World Studios last July. My muse feels like it has been plugged in to the mains once again. The joy I get from making music has been energetically rekindled, just as I described in my review of Coryat and Dobson's book. But while the 20-song game is an interesting and stimulating exercise to have done, I don't think I'd want to play it more than two or three times a year unless it gets easier the more you do it. That's possible, of course—but the only way I'm going to find that out is by doing it. Cognitively speaking, it was incredibly hard work and I wasn't exactly starting bright-eyed and bushy-tailed because on Friday night I'd been doing live sound for the Function 246 folk at the Tav. That required me to be laser-focused on their sound for three hours and it didn't help matters that I'd forgotten to take my earplugs with me. I got to bed in the small hours of Saturday morning so spending most of yesterday running my critical faculties flat out and then going to bed after one in the morning again has taken its toll. Today I am toast. I haven't pushed myself intellectually as hard as this for a long time, and I'm really feeling the after effects. I had an abysmal night's sleep last night and this morning I feel edgy and over-caffeinated.
So this afternoon I'm going to be doing something a lot less cognitively challenging: cooking a giant batch of pork curry. Hopefully I'll feel more like my old self after that.
I've been really enjoying my experience over at Pixelfed. There are one or two bugs that still need to be ironed out (the "portfolio" feature is supposed to let you select your favourite shots out of the last hundred photos you posted, but it only ever displays the last fifty photos in your stream, for example) but as a federated alternative to Instagram, I'm very happy with the lack of corporate advertising, sponsored posts, or nefarious algorithm tweaking. What you get is what you see, as it were.
I've made a habit of posting at least one photo a day there for a few weeks now. I've been going through my archives as well as posting new stuff and looking at my feed makes me think I might actually have turned out to be a fairly good photographer.
One would hope so, given that at this point I've been taking photos for nearly sixty years...
The blog, like me, is showing its age. The Internet is an amorphous beast and its contents shift and change over the years. I just went back twenty years to see what I was up to on this date and apart from being obsessed with photography (so nothing much has changed there, then) most of the links in my blog entries back then no longer lead anywhere.
I'm not going to go back and update the page, or try to find links to the same stories that might still exist. Even ten years ago, making a decision to do that would have left me feeling stressed and frustrated but these days I just haven't got the spoons to care any more. It's just the way things go. Twenty years from now, will those photos I've uploaded still be available on Pixelfed? Will this blog still be online? I suspect I'd be very surprised if they were.
Because this is a reminder that the mythical "Cloud" which we rely on for things like music and movies to stream from, or photos to store, or authentication servers to give us access to software we think we've bought to use forever can just go away and there will be nothing we can do about it (apart, maybe, from searching for cracked versions). That's why I consider that the small fortune I spent last year getting all of my hardware synths fixed and brought back to match fitness was a very good investment. That's why I still buy Blu-Rays and CDs. And it's why I was browsing home audio websites last night looking for a hi-fi separates cassette player. I'm strictly old school. And the older I get, the more determined I become to stay that way.
Today I learned that Century 21 Productions (a company that was founded in 1957 by Gerry Anderson) is back in business as Century 21 Films, and that ten years ago they made three new episodes of Gerry's classic television series Thunderbirds to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the show. How did I not hear about this until now?
I was astonished to discover that these new shows feature the original cast, using audio from three recordings that were made at the height of the show's success and released on vinyl as 33 rpm seven-inch singles. The new shows also (of course) feature composer Barry Gray's iconic music. And rather than using CGI, they've been made using the techniques that were employed by the people who filmed the original show: practical sets, hand-made puppets, and lots of things blowing up filmed at 120 frames per second and then slowed down to 24 fps. The results are almost indistinguishable from the originals.
Thunderbirds was my favourite show on television when I was five years old. If you'd asked me back then what my goal in life was when I grew up I would have told you without hesitation that I wanted to be Scott Tracy. So I was delighted to discover that you can watch all three of the new episodes for free on ITVx.
I looked at the back lawn yesterday morning and decided that enough was enough and it was time to give it its first cut of the year. Before I got the mower out I weeded the flower bed at the front (nearly filling my gardening trug in the process) but I forgot to put on my pair of gardening gloves before I did that, so I now have the remains of an enormous blister on the palm of my right hand. Ouch.
When I mowed the back lawn I was being followed around the garden by my tame female blackbird, which was making delighted clucking noises as she unearthed one tasty treat after another. When I reviewed footage from my trail cam this morning, the local hedgehogs looked pleased that they no longer had to barge their way through clumps of grass that were nearly a foot high to get from one side of the lawn to the other. I was pleased to see that the trail cam's battery is back up to 100% charge, too. At one point during the winter it had dropped down to 50% by the end of the night, but its solar panel has brought it back up to full charge without me having to bring it inside for a top-up.
Yesterday's bright sunshine brought out the blossom on the cherry tree very nicely. But even though I've cut the lawn, I don't think I've seen the last of the winter; the temperature outside dropped down to 0°C (32°F) last night. This morning it's nowhere near as sunny thanks to a hazy layer of cloud that's rolled in but enough sunlight has been getting through for the roof to be generating 3 kW or so, so laundry day has been declared. I've changed the bedclothes and I've got the washing machine running but I'm still exporting 2 kW back to the grid right now. And so far this month I've now exported more than twice the amount of electricity than I've used.
But oh boy, everything hurts this morning. I had a lousy night's sleep last night (my fitness app awarded me a score of just 74) and I feel like I've been in a car crash. I'm going to take things easy today.
March set records for sunshine and low rainfall in the UK, and I'm beginning to think that we will be experiencing one of the country's semi-regular droughts by the time that summer arrives. It's either that, or we'll be suffering from widespread flooding once again. These days, it's either one or the other. The amount of rainfall recorded in Lancaster last month was a third of its average value and the lowest since records began there sixty years ago, so my money's on the drought option right now.
April brought with it a strong omega block that has been sitting over the UK for more than a week now and that's meant a string of days of clear blue skies and uninterrupted sunshine. Once again when I opened the curtains this morning it was bright and sunny outside. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and that's still the case now, a few hours later. It's been perfect weather for solar panels. According to my energy provider, so far this month I've used 78 kWh of electricity. But I've exported 160 kWh back to the grid.
It's still getting pretty cold at night here, but today the blossom is starting to come out on the cherry tree in the back garden and I think I'm going to have to give the lawn its first cut of the year tomorrow. The sunshine is expected to continue for at least the rest of the week.
Have I been out in it? Well, I did walk down to the pub on Friday afternoon and I've been to the Co-op a couple of times, but other than that I've been indoors either reading more of Raymond Chandler's books or playing with the new audio interface in my bedroom studio (it's working well, and I'm still very pleased with it).
Although I've spent quite a bit of time in the studio this week, most of it has been spent in listening parties or watching livestreams from friends on Twitch. I haven't ended up with much in the way of new music of my own. I'd planned to give the new laptop a thorough test by recording something with it set up on the dining room table, but it's been three days since I even powered it on.
The brain fog has definitely kicked in lately. I'm finding it extremely difficult to focus on anything. Sustained bouts of concentration are more or less impossible, and even sitting down and playing guitar for anything longer than ten minutes has been a challenge. I've been going back to bed in the afternoons with a book to read, but this invariably ends up with me taking a nap for an hour or so because that's what it feels like I need to do.
I've slobbed out on the sofa quite a lot. I'm still working my way through all five seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks and I have a couple of episodes of season four left to watch before I get round to watch season five for the first time. I really enjoy the show, and it's been fun—but I keep getting the nagging feeling that I really ought to be doing something more productive with my time. That lasts for roughly fifteen seconds, and then I remember just how burned out I was a few years ago and remind myself that I'm still recovering from (waves hand vaguely around the room) everything and it's okay to be operating well below par. With the state I'm in at the moment, I'd be more surprised if I wasn't struggling. But this doesn't feel like depression to me. I've been medication free for more than a year now, and my mood still feels better than it has done for a long time (thanks, I suspect, to the fact that I can get by without having to leave the house or go anywhere further afield than the pub more than once or twice a month). Are these post-Covid symptoms, am I just generally run down after a long winter, or is there something else going on? Right now, I don't have the mental fortitude to think about that. I'm just going to keep plugging away and hope that all this nice weather will eventually permeate through my thick skull and make me feel better.
The new audio interface for the studio that I blogged about last month was delivered at lunchtime yesterday. After a bit of head scratching as I figured out how its much more complicated routing options were best suited to how I was going to use it, I'd slotted it into some spare rack space in the studio and it was up and running by early afternoon.
It's fast. I've been able to significantly reduce the latency in Ableton. I've got its loopback running into OBS and Audacity, so I can route audio from any application into a livestream or record it as a file. The gain controls are far more accurate than they are on the M4, allowing adjustments in 1 dB steps. The metering display on the front panel is splendid. So far, at least, its performance appears to be rock solid, so it looks like this was money well spent.
This meant that I was free to get the old MOTU M4 hooked up to the new laptop. Again, things seem to be running without any hiccups.
The only other thing I'll need to do before I'm ready for my upcoming session at Real World is to restring the Stick and the Warr Guitar (and stock up on a couple of spare sets of strings for both of them into the bargain). Once that's done, I should be all set.
Many thanks to everyone who showed up for last night's ICH listening party. There were more than thirty people logged in, which makes me very happy.
And extra special thanks to everyone who bought a copy of the album!
As you may already have seen, Kilby Blades, the Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) announced yesterday that the enterprise is being shut down. In her video, she explains that the board had concluded that the current decline in both participation and sponsorship of the site was not going to cover the six-figure debt that the organisation has been carrying since 2020 so it was time to call it a day.
The news has—ironically—prompted a flurry of conflicting narratives, and not just because it was published on April Fools' Day. To start with, the announcement was made on her personal YouTube channel rather than the site's official one. Did she have board approval to make the announcement, I wonder? Was this done to preempt someone else's version of events gaining precedence, perhaps?
Read the comments on that video (never read comments on YouTube, folks; it's not good for you) and you'll see significant concerns being raised about the "official" reason being presented for shuttering the site, which is that the community was at fault. Too many people wanted to take part without making a donation; effectively the blame is being placed on people wanting access to all the good stuff for free.
While I know from my own experience as an unpaid mod for FAWM and 50/90 that there are a lot of folk who never make a donation to support the costs of running the challenge, this is often because they just can't afford to do so, or they simply don't realise how much money it costs to keep the lights on.
That's not to say its members aren't always entirely free from blame when a community runs into difficulties; there's a specific sort of participant who is very vocal when it comes to criticising the service they're getting, even though they're not bothering to pay for it. I've blogged here several times about how burned out I was feeling as a FAWM and 50/90 moderator because a very small number or people were behaving in a grossly entitled manner that did not fit in with the spirit of the challenge in any way. After 50/90 closed last year, I was very close to quitting for good.
But few participants would view their taking part as being quite the drain on resources that Kilby argues is the case with NaNoWriMo. The narrative that's being presented here feels like an attempt to shift blame away from anything that the organizers did.
And I can see plenty of reasons why they might want to do that, because they need to consider how much their own behaviour contributed to the crisis that has now overtaken them. People have been leaving NaNoWriMo in large numbers, and it's not difficult to see why.
NaNoWriMo's business practices first got attention back in 2022, when a sponsorship deal with a vanity press (and I'm being kinder to them than they deserve, calling them that) by the name of Inkitt involved a "competition" in which a lucky winner would get a publishing contract that was almost immediately called out by professional writers as a scam. But NaNoWriMo really hit the headlines last year after they published a statement decreeing that anyone who rejected the use of AI for creative work was being classist and ableist. This did not go down well. Several board members resigned and at least one of their major sponsors parted ways with NaNoWriMo as a result. The site's reputation was already in tatters at this point after issues regarding forum safety had been raised earlier in 2024; unlike FAWM, which enforces a strict age limit on those taking part, NaNoWriMo had actively encouraged young children to participate but there were absolutely no background checks in place to make sure that they were protected from grooming by potential abusers. When concerns were raised, the issue was allegedly downplayed.
I'm sad it's come to this. I took part in NaNoWriMo several times back in the day (the first was back in 2006) and I really enjoyed the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in just thirty days. But then I discovered FAWM, and that was—still is—very much more my sort of thing. FAWM is very different to NaNoWriMo in many respects (it's much, much smaller, for one thing) but there are some important lessons to be learned from what happened here, and you can be sure that the organizers are aware of them.
A quick reminder that my fellow ICH bandmates and I will be having a listening party for the new album on Bandcamp tonight at 8 pm BST.
Even back when I started this blog (way back in 2003) I had already become extremely tired of just how pathetic an enterprise April Fools' Day had become. Marketing and PR agencies treat it as an excuse to wheel out dad jokes and crap copy that any sub-editor with an iota of self respect would throw into the bin (and then set fire to it) on any other day of the year. Yes, the spaghetti harvest was a fun jape back in 1957, but it was fun because nobody did that sort of thing back then, particularly an organization as august as the British Broadcasting Corporation and it would certainly never have occurred to people that someone with the sort of gravitas that Richard Dimbleby undoubtedly had would have agreed to take part in such weightless frivolity. And it was amusing because television didn't show programmes that were obviously made up and pretend that they were serious documentaries.
In complete contrast, just taking tomorrow as a random sample, I will be able to watch a documentary claiming that shapeshifting aliens live underneath a ranch in Utah, a show purporting to show UFO footage shot by the United States Department of Homeland Security, an examination of the Bigfoot legend claiming that it's based on a real animal (it is, but it's bears; ditto for Sasquatch, and the Yeti), and two programmes presented by Giorgio Tsoukalos asserting that aliens were responsible for building most of Earth's ancient monuments.
These days, April the first has become the day when the most dreadful sort of media hack there is drops their last pretension of doing worthy or serious work. And quite frankly, with the state of the world as it is right now, the venerable practice of "making shit up" just isn't even remotely funny any more. If you think I'm being a killjoy about this, maybe you ought to be paying a little more attention to the news because I've got a message for you: we're in big trouble. The fools are in charge now.
Oh, and by the way: did you know that 21% of American adults (that's more than one in five) are illiterate? As the enshittification of not just the Internet but absolutely everything grows and grows, I'm more convinced than ever that April Fools' Day is a thing that needs to be quietly abandoned and left to die in peace. It's not just that we don't need it any more; it's become both poster child and symptom of an existential threat.
Kill it. Kill it with fire.
While we're on the subject of literacy, what was the last book you read? Do you read for pleasure?
I'm just going to mention, in the least-smug way that I can, that I've been doing a lot of reading so far this year. I'm already a third of the way toward my goal of reading 60 books (last year I read and reviewed 80 books; the year before, 76).
I love reading. I always have, but these days the practice of losing myself in the pages of a good book has become even more enjoyable as a means of escape from everything else that's going on. Right now, I am 1,200 pages in to a collection of every single piece of short fiction that Raymond Chandler ever wrote, and it's been a delight. I'm also still slowly working my way through an even larger collection of the supernatural fiction of Algernon Blackwood (who was one of H. P. Lovecraft's strongest influences) and while most of his tales tend to fall apart in the final act, they're still intensely atmospheric and deliciously spooky.