Adventure Mode

 Hola cosmonauts. 

 What's new with you? Anyone learning the accordion?   

 It's been something of an interesting month. We're into full Bulgarian summer now and our faces are all peeling off like a radiation leak in a sci fi movie.   

 I put out the paperback of The Prince of Milk last month, expecting not much of a reaction really. What I got instead was something akin to when you touch the cooking hob to check it's not hot and your fingers get vapourised. Or: people were more interested in it than I was expecting. Some of you have kindly sent me photos of the book next to your cats, or your mothers. I'm not joking about the second one. For whatever reason that was a prevalent trend in my inbox over about a week. You have issues. They're cool issues, but you have them.   

 Anyway, the kind emails and photos of people's mums gave me exactly the spur I needed to get shit done. I can say for certain now that the new book is finished after lots of nice evenings sat on the balcony staring at a Word document and trying to stop the cat committing suicide. (Either she just doesn't get heights or she longs to die, I'm not sure.)
 Anyway, more on that when it actually appears.   

 I hope you liked the recent video. It was one of those occasions when no ideas turn up for a few weeks. I'd gone to visit some friends in Germany. I woke up one morning feeling like shit, tired, moany, etc, and thought “fuck this, I'll go for a run”. You may have noticed when you're feeling like shit, and you're tired and moany, the last thing you want to do is go running. But it always, always helps. And it did.   

 About 10 minutes in, plodding along the lip of this gorgeous canal, I thought it might be cool to have a go at some rap. (I'd heard This is America a few days before and couldn't stop listening to it, whatever the hell the lyrics mean.) The script was a piece of shit and I bailed on it twice in favour of other ideas, but just kept coming back to it, for whatever reason. In any case, crap or not, it finally got finished. 

 I wonder if there's a better feeling than finishing something you were convinced you weren't going to. The harder the thing, the greater the chemical payoff at the end, I've generally found. And it seems like that's one of the problems with lots of modern work, if one finds themselves at a huge company, or doing admin stuff or whatever. No doubt the work is important to the whole organisation, but there's no  definitive end when you can actually round all the edges off and feel done with it. I've said before that I know lots of people who do that kind of thing and are really happy with it. But hot damn, I wouldn't be. I was also fired from my first two jobs for total incompetence, so I'm hardly the best judge here.  

 
 Want to talk about some recommendations? I've done a fair bit of reading and series-watching of late. Are you following The Expanse? If not, you'll dig it. After the first season it really comes into its own with a sci-fi twist I won't ruin, but will say it's a real humdinger. By the third season it's full on PTSD inducing.   

 The Wandering Earth was a book of short stories I finally got hold of by one of my current heroes, Liu Cixin. I won't spoil anything but safe to say: alien contact, engines that drive planets, and journeys to the centre of Earth. You'll like it.   

 I've been running a lot of late. I'd like to tell you about Adventure Mode. There's a feeling I've noticed, when the sun is just right over the park, and you've slept enough, and are adequately full of coffee, and you're out on a run. It feels like what people go on about during near-death experiences: total freedom from your usual worries, just 'being present'. And I think what's going on is that it puts you in 'adventure mode'. You may've felt it when travelling, when embarking on a new relationship, when something new and exciting is going on and the world feels like it has actual momentum. In that moment you feel totally free to go after new projects or learn a new skill or just step outside of mundane, worrying life for a while. I don't know about you, but this is the mood I depend on to actually have a think about what the fuck I'm doing with my life, or where the next video is going to come from. For a while the world feels like an adventure again and nothing is scary.   

 So, may I humbly recommend that if things are getting mundane, if life is turning into a long stream of grey and interchangable days, well: go and do something novel. Take a trip somewhere silly. Befriend new people. Get a violin teacher. Attempt to transmute cat poop into gold. Whatever.   

 No doubt our ancestors moved around a lot, they were nomadic for long periods of human history. Living in the same spot for long durations might really be fucking with our general senses of wellness. It doesn't seem impossible anyway. 

 More than that, just changing your temperament with exercise or adventure seems way easier than repeating mantras in your head or looking at little positive thinking flashcards. (Do people do that, by the way?)   

 Go do something new. That's all I'm saying. It usually makes me feel better anyway.   

 In other ranting-one-sidedly-about-my-life-to-you news, I've finally entered into the VR cult. And my god, it's everything I ever wanted and more. I'll be uploading some videos from inside VR shortly, and I do hope you're as blown away as I was. It wasn't just the immersion that got me. It was what you can do. There are apps that model 4D shapes for example. 4 FUCKING D. It's what I always, always wanted to play with. Or you can soar across the planet via Google Earth like a god. Or hang out with your own robot dog and throw digital sticks for him while you ignore your real world cat because you're frankly sick of her ungrateful attitude towards all the treats and litter box cleaning.   

 Anyway. Yes. 

 As always, your support is immensely, immensely kind. The last video took a hefty quantity of stock-footage purchasing and it turns out that stuff really isn't cheap. At the same time I'm not sure my stuff would work without it – if indeed it works at all...I couldn't have made any of it without your help. What I'm saying is thank you, massively, and I hope you're enjoying my stuff.   

 I've noticed a number of emails I still haven't replied to from you lot from the last month. Totally unacceptable I know, and I'll get on all of them in the next day or so. I read everything and try my best to reply when I can.   
 

IN ANY CASE, I hope you're beavering away on your own endeavours and enjoying the approaching summer. I think this one's going to be particularly lovely. (Do you ever remind yourself what the year is, and freak out at how far into the future it sounds?)   

 Much love from this tortoise, and all the very best wishes,   

 Ex.