hi! how are you? it’s been a month but it feels like ten million years and a day all at once. having lots of mundane, every life realisations about time at the moment; you only get one summer for each year of your life! the summer of this age was too hot for me and possibly everyone, and i don’t get a do-over!

i’m sending this email from the bad place which i apologise for. since i’m not seriously monetising this list any time soon/probably ever i needed a more reliable, still free solution. i don’t know if other people experience the choking that comes not from worrying you have nothing to say, but of being an intrusion, a bother, wasting the time you have been kindly allotted? thinking about i think i experience it in a lot of contexts, something to cover in therapy maybe, but i feel it incredibly deeply with newsletters.

second and final apology: for those affected by The Great Newsletter Burp of the last issue of this newsletter from my last provider, the main reason for swapping here is to prevent that ever happening again, deeply sorry for the amount of emails you received! hopefully no one who unsubbed gets this again but unsure how to reconcile the two lists in substack without sending out another, if smaller, deluge of email.

i think i have a touch of the old anhedonia. “research as a leisure activity” is basically untouched, thankfully. writing anything that requires capital letters in the normal places and/or heavy structural massaging is difficult for me (and most writers i guess) normally, but a fun challenge. at the moment it feels like i’m a much weaker sisyphus. everyday i get temporarily fatally squashed after a little pushing of the boulder, it’s just too much for my noodly body. waking up each day to realise that actually i do kinda want to try again, you know, for the gainz. maybe i’ll make it more than a few paces uphill this time!

reading: finished positive obsession, a biography of octavia butler. in progress is a long game, a book about writing fiction i love the tone of, tell it slant, a book about writing nonfiction that i need to engage with the exercises of, so am reading artificially slowly, oops, and the complications, a mental health/madness memoir i don’t agree with the arguments of a lot of time, but still really enjoy the prose of.

watching: oceans eight (delightful fluff, i too would frame a terrible ex who sent me to prison for 38 millions dollars), bad apples (some of the children got really fun roles to play, and it was enjoyably surreal), not as much YouTube as usual.

listening: hozier, penelope scott, same old, same old. suggest me some fun new albums?

researching: dark skies research has dovetailed with starlink as they apparently want to launch one million satellites as low earth orbit AI data centers?? i already knew individual satellites themselves weren’t as dark or unobtrusive as they could be, and affect both naked eye viewing of the night sky and astronomer photography, but there’s so much more potential environmental impact going from like 350 launches to low earth orbit a year to over 70,000…. really interested in artificial light at night (ALAN, cute acronym) at the moment!

wrote two weeknotes since last time, #65 and #66 and one additional livestream on a few of my current research interests.

hope you’re having a great day! see you on the flip side.

any typos are ‘cos i didn’t re-read, i mean, are on purpose actually.

wishing you more than the best, olu online 💟