Status: 4 Mar 2023

My beloved and I went out to the movies last night, having decided the opportunity to see Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear on the big screen was worth the stress of being out among large crowds of people. It was definitely our kind of movie, and delivered exactly what we’d hoped: a drugged out bear pulling people apart, enough subplot to keep the action meaningful, and the occasional over-the top moment.

Cocaine Bear is a movie that knows exactly what it’s doing. It knows you’ve come in to cheer to the bear on, not care about any of the human characters. My primary fear going in was that it’d break the internal verisimilitude of the world in the name of ‘humour’ (aka the Sharknado 3 issue), but it was more restrained than I expected on that front (although my definition of restraint is not going to be shared by everyone).

NEW WORK

My latest short story, Or For Eternity Hold Your Piece, goes live on Patreon in a little under two hours. It’s not the piece I’ve been working on all this week, but another I’ve been tinkering with in the background where I played with the kind of maximalism that permeated James Wan’s Aquaman. A pair of monster hunters go to disrupt a wedding between two otherworldly entities, but their plans go awry when more than one guest objects to the impending nuptials.

You can get this and—Gods, this is adding up—thirty-five other stories by signing up for as little as a buck a month, with new work coming every week.

ON THE DOCKET

Saturdays are a bit of a wildcard on the projects front, as my beloved is home and it’s nominally the day to catch up on chores. The rest of the day will be spent doing all the distributor uploads I didn’t have time to do yesterday.

After the success of implementing Tiago Forte’s One Touch Email system earlier in the week, I’ve looped around to his Second Brain system and started plotting how to integrate it with my workload a little better. This mostly means revising his book and looking at my current process, noting problems to solve (how to integrate a physical journal and electronic note system) and weaknesses in my approach (great at capture, terrible at processing), then logging things to try.

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 10

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 14

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 6