A Productivity Hack That's Been Helping Me Lately
Hey everybody! If you're looking to get a holiday gift for the humans (or other sentient beings) in your life, I just wanted to mention that you can get signed, personalized copies of any of my books from Folio Books in San Francisco. As always, you can get a * nice cat doodle * in your book, and I will draw a cat doing whatever job you specify in the comments on your order. They ship all over the place!
I used to be way better at staying focused on pouring words into a word processor, which would puree them gently into a delicious word slurry that I would send to my publisher. (At which point the publisher takes the word slurry, mixes it with gravel and limestone to turn it into decorative bricks for your garden, or so I'm assuming.) Anyway, in recent years it's gotten harder to tear my gaze away from the sussurating horrors gathering in the desolate crevices of the collective unconscious.
Basically, the doomscrolling has gotten harder and harder to resist. It's bad for my concentration — and, frankly, for my mental health.
(To be clear, I support staying informed about the state of the world! But not to the point where you're just marinating in learned helplessness. And I really believe what I wrote in that book, that creativity is a worthwhile and valid way to deal with awful times. And as I keep saying, daydreaming is the opposite of doomscrolling — and daydreams are powerful.)
So I've come up with a productivity hack to keep myself from staring at news sites and social media all day. I recently told a friend about this method, and she seemed to find it useful too. So here it is.
Basically, my main problem is social media and news sites, plus emails to some extent. All of this stuff lives on my browser on my computer at home, and I experimented for a few years with installing browser extensions to block certain sites during daytime hours — but they usually wanted to invade my privacy, and they weren't super reliable.
Then I discovered a way to just make my browser inaccessible during work hours, using my Mac's settings. (I'm running the latest version, Sonoma 14.1.1.)
So basically you just go into your System Preferences and look for "Downtime". I think this is for when you're going to bed, but I use it for daytime, between 10:30 AM and 7 PM:
And then, also in System Preferences, I go into "Always Allowed" to select the programs that can always run even during downtime. (Not including my browser!)
Then basically, every day from 10:30 to 7, my computer blanks out all the apps that aren't in "Always Allowed," so I don't feel as tempted to go look at Assigned Media or other news sites when I'm supposed to be working.
But what if I absolutely need to get into Gmail or check a piece of information online? Well, there's always my phone. But also, you can disable the "downtime" filter pretty easily if you have to — it just adds an extra step that reminds you that you really ought to be working instead.
Bonus Rant: The Marvel Cinematic Universe Will Be Fine
Don't believe the negative hype. Sure, The Marvels did not do great at the box office, and neither did Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But this seems like a bump in the road, to be honest.
Quantumania did about as well at the domestic box office as the previous Ant-Man and the Wasp film. (The main difference in the worldwide box office is China, where U.S. films just aren't doing as well anymore.) Putting this another way, Ant-Man films have never been massive hits, and the first two did pretty well as grounded adventures featuring corporate scumball villains. So the third ant-film probably shouldn't have gotten a bigger budget and a drastic change of format. (And no Michael Peña?!)
Meanwhile, I greatly enjoyed The Marvels, but they probably should have made a direct sequel to the massively popular Captain Marvel, instead of pivoting to an ensemble film. The impact of the SAG-AFTRA strike also can't be discounted, and neither can a fall covid surge. Early ticket sales were weaker than expected — meaning that for whatever reason, people decided to skip The Marvels long before any reviews had been published and before they had any way of knowing whether it was a good film. Anyway, don't be too surprised if The Marvels becomes a ginormous hit on Disney plus, because it's genuinely delightful.
Whatever is going on, it's much bigger than Marvel. Movie theaters in general are struggling, but that's been true for quite a while, even before covid. Many people now own excellent home theater systems, and don't see any need to go to the theater unless it's a must-see event — this has been a problem since the late 2000s, and it's the main reason why Marvel and a few other tentpole franchises became so dominant at the theater in the first place. Any and all U.S. films are much less likely to crack $1 billion going forward, because China and Russia no longer boost overseas grosses.
(Meanwhile, everybody younger than Boomers decided to cancel their cable subscription, forcing entertainment companies to adapt to streaming at a frantic pace, and gutting an advertising model that had been successful for decades. This is one of those situations where technology legitimately does transform an industry, and it remains to be seen if Hollywood will be able to adapt successfully.)
But in spite of the occasional success of a movie like Oppenheimer and the occasional failure of a film like The Marvels, Marvel remains one of the few entities capable of navigating this new theatrical environment with any reliable success. We are never going back to a world where a $25 million comedy starring some actors from SNL is a semi-reliable box-office smash.
But anyway: yes, the MCU has hit a speed bump, but the Marvel brand remains really strong. The selling point for these films has never been "See this year's film so you can understand next year's film," but rather, "See this year's film, because it features charming people rushing through fun set pieces." (There's a reason they stick all the most blatant teases of interconnected synergies during the end credits, when most people who aren't terminally online fans get up to go pee.)
Deadpool 3 is pretty much a guaranteed hit, and I'm pretty sure people will turn up for Captain America and Thunderbolts. (I also expect James Gunn's Superman reboot to do well.) This isn't a scenario like the Transformers films, where every movie is just robots punching each other and turning into vehicles, a format which legitimately did lead to fatigue after a slew of hits. Marvel has succeeded in part by leaning into the fact that superheroes aren't a genre, but rather a mashup of every genre ever created, allowing them to do high fantasy, political thrillers, space opera, and whatever else.
Audiences still really love these movies, and after a brief hiatus, people will be hungry for more. I'm pretty convinced that sometime in 2025, everyone will be writing breathless articles about the incredible comeback story of both Marvel and DC Films.
Stuff I Love Right Now
OMG you guys. The Buccaneers, now showing on AppleTV+, is wonderful. It's pretty much everything I needed right now: plucky American ladies in the 1870s rushing over to Britain to marry impoverished British aristocrats, resulting in a huge culture clash. It's sassy and ridiculous and just a goddamn delight. I like it even better than The Gilded Age, and it's everything I needed right now. The cast is uniformly brilliant, especially Barney Fishwick as the utterly creepy abuser, Lord Seadown — he takes a one-note villain role and turns it into something utterly compelling. This show is worth springing for a month or two of AppleTV+ – at which point you can watch the new Godzilla show, which is also great!
I finally got around to reading The Variants by Gail Simone and Phil Noto, a five-issue comic book (now collected in paperback) in which Jessica Jones meets her alternate selves from other universes. I may be getting a bit tired of superhero multiverses*, but I love them, when they're done as well as this. Gail Simone writes damaged, tender, heroic women better than anyone alive, and my main complaint about this comic is that Simone isn't writing an ongoing Jessica Jones series. Please make this happen, Marvel!
* Before anyone writes to me, yes, I also love the Spider-Verse films, another example of multiverses done well.
My Stuff
I've got a lot going on, but honestly I'm just going to direct your attention back to the top of the page. I will draw a cat doing any job you specify. See below for a few past examples...
