I just got exactly that thump of sound and vision watching a few minutes of mission control while Johan Johansson’s “The Cause of Labour Is The Hope Of The World” played in the background, and it was beautiful.

Screengrab from the Nasa.gov livestream

Related; there’s a cinematographic language – and an associated mode of storytelling – being denied to current technology, and the building of that technology, and that is starting to unsettle me.

Bokeh photography (a.k.a. every film on Vimeo) is reserved, by and large, for artisanal production, for romanticising industries and techniques now thought of as quaint or in decline. And that feels squiffy. There’s a kind of visual longing and love in that style that I’d like to see applied to emerging technologies and practices, one that enables short and lively stories so that people, well, so that people feel happy to hit ‘like’.

Basically, I’m bored of promotional films for high-end coffee shops being retweeted into my stream. I want more things like this by BERG, or this by VOY, or this by Lonelyleap.

Talking it out with Anne has helped get a sense of the kind of thing we’d both like to see, so now we’ve got to find time to start doing it. We might not get Johan Johansson to score them, but if it gets even a tiny bit closer to that Spotify/NASA combo then it’s a win.

* I’m acutely aware that there’s a bunch of stuff I’m missing, so please do fling them @mattsheret when you find them.

I’ve learned an awful lot in the last two years, and done much much more than I ever expected to. It’s been brilliant and difficult and totally unique. I’m going to miss the scrobbles, grumpy amazing developers and my job title an awful lot.

Next I’m off to Barcelona for a boozy holiday at a music festival: I’m told this is required behaviour for anyone leaving Last.HQ.

After that? I’m going to be freelancing. I’ve got a few projects lined up for the next couple of months (more on those soon), but if you want to chat to me about any writing, project management, or general consulting-type-stuff then drop me a line at matthew.sheret@gmail.com.

I was staring at London’s skyline I was staring at Miniland London’s skyline in the Legoland park the other day and something started to bug me. Who decides which buildings get in?

Literally some cities from across Europe are presented in glorious plastic blocks in Legoland, with a mish-mash of places you’ll know and places you won’t. Loch Ness makes it, as does a place once known as Britain’s smallest pub, and there’s a terrific Angel of The North in there too.

But London’s the place most familiar to me, and seeing St. Paul’s, Nelson’s Column, and 1 Canary Wharf butted up within a few feet of one another is pretty entertaining. It totally skews the city geography, warping the river and flipping the buildings into unrecognisable configurations – all of which is only right and proper – and the buildings themselves are magnificently constructed. But who has the final say on what gets in?

City Hall made it, and I don’t know many people who know what it is or what it looks like; two cinemas on Leicester Square make it, but neither are the Odeon; when did The Gherkin get the go-ahead?

There’s a wonderful bit in a dream-like sequence in Phonogram where a character moves from Bristol to Camden in a flash because he hasn’t really got a sense of the places in-between, and these mini-cities sort of feel like that… consensus views of imaginary places. But they aren’t wholly imaginary because people have to plan and build huge structures out of tiny bricks.

So who fills in the gaps, and what’s the approval process? Is this space waiting for a Shard, or is it too soon for that to be part of the imagined London? Is it just making space for an errant Burj Khalifa? I’m going to ask some people and see where it goes, so if anyone knows anyone that could help do give me a shout.

TCAF was terrific. Chris and the rest of the crew throw an excellent shindig, making the trip over to Canada absolutely worth it. Definitely one to return to next year.

Of particular note was the Commonwealth Comics panel I appeared on with Pat Grant, Sarah Howell, Annie Koyama and Leon Avelino, chaired superbly by John Retallick. Great fun and very informative, one thing left ringing in my head related to the differences between British and Aussie comics culture.

Sarah mentioned that they don’t have many retail-based opportunities, so lots of their get-togethers are driven by skill-swaps, talks, and workshops. In the UK it often feels like the only time we chat is after a show, where the first question is “How did you do?”. Some kind of ‘Comics Camp” might be a neat way of snapping out of that… it’s an idea I’d like to poke at for a while at any rate.

I didn’t get any photos of TCAF – too busy selling comics – so you’ll have to make do with the very Canadian newspaper above and the wall of my hotel room below.

When you do something – anything – with words it’s often a good idea to speak them aloud to see if the sentence scans. But there’s a problem with that; if you’re familiar with the words, or comfortable with the rhythm of your writing, you can probably make it sound okay even if it isn’t.

Instead, try reading your work aloud as if you’re Stewart Lee doing an impression of Morgan Freeman.

(If you need to, you can listen to Stewart Lee doing an impression of Morgan Freeman on YouTube. If you aren’t wearing headphones, it’s not at all safe for work.)

(The actual logic here is that the Lee-Morgan Method slows my voice down quite some way. Picking any accent that snaps your usual cadence has pretty much the same effect; might I suggest the Bremner-Brown Method)

The Sinking of the Titanic is a powerful piece of music that has spent the last 33 years evolving (or, I guess, the last hundred years evolving, or the last n years, where n is the time elapsed since first a person was lost at sea and other were left to wonder what it felt like), and it was performed at the Barbican last night.

There was a passage played where the looping hymn is disrupted by an unnatural creaking that is, at once, ice and metal rending and hearts breaking. And I have no idea what makes that sound. What makes that sound made me think of cold water and metal hulks groaning in the silence. It makes me think of the quiet and the thing that happens to ice cubes in glasses of fluid but magnified to a size larger than my head can handle. It is deep and sharp all at once, all pitches, cutting across every other musician, emphasising the hopelessness of the hymn that loops. And I have no idea what makes that noise. But it made me cry.

EDIT: 08:52

I am now looking for two things one thing. One is something like the thing I described the other day. The other is the name of the book that’s being described above.

Jonty tells me that the story being described above was Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator. Brilliant. At the moment the Wikipedia plot desription of it closes with the following;

The story ends on a fearful note, as more and more of the world’s writers are forced into licensing their names-and all hope of human creativity-to the machine.

Another reason I definitely don’t want that machine. The thing I’m looking for is altogether quieter. I described it on Twitter yesterday as “something that could mull over copy for me” which is about right.

1 fall machines

2 and suggestions, elicited machines

I’m post suggestions, chains. And quite I’m by Cut-up elicited of two categories; 1 by chains, and nice not into Markov.

I realised today that when it comes to writing a biog or a positioning statement that job could benefit from a companion-bot/non-human actor.

What I want is something a bit like this

And a bit like this

As I moved words around today I realised I was looking at something a little bit like Tom’s Markov Chocolate Twitterbot. But putting the original documents through a Markov chain wouldn’t be enough, I’d want to be able to influence the outcome of the next iteration of text (to, say, pick two outcomes to propagate the next generation of text).

It wouldn’t have to be perfect. The idea is that it sparks enough connections to make me write the line I need to write.

So, does this exist? Can I have it?

Misty morning, and the first meeting of The After School Club for Copywriters in ages. Kat joined Quinns and I today, and after a few introductions we got stuck into the most varied chats we’ve had over brekkie in ages.

The mantra ‘Be Interested‘ got rooted deep in my head a little while back. That’s been rubbing against a filter bubble I’ve found myself in recently, frantically trying to burst the bloody thing. Last week Tom offered to listen to my talk Campire Stories to help me think about it in new ways, and after doing so I’ve found myself swamped with links and perspectives as well as a desire to process them – really process them.

This morning felt like a really great way of doing that. We looped from R&D process to Quinn’s crazy new work to stand-up comedy to Inspector Spacetime, and somewhere along the way I started thinking about new ways of presenting talks and different takes on reviewing working practices. That’s the benefit of meeting as ‘the club’ and not just meeting; my brain’s ready to be in a working context. If I went to the pub ready to think about work then, well, it’d be a waste of a good whisky.

I have a tendency to try and work some of this stuff out in my own time, but feeling threads join up through chatter is amazing. After a bit of information overload last year I retreated from that kind of stuff, and in retrospect that was silly.

Lesson Eleven: Conversations can be extraordinarily efficient ways to process information.

Actually, you know what, I think this is what I was trying to get at with Lesson Seven. So how about this;

Lesson Seven: Talk about what you’re up to.
Lesson Eleven: Conversations can be extraordinarily efficient ways to process information.
Lesson Seven: You can process information extraordinarily efficiently with a conversation.