Daynote - Tue 21 Apr 2026

Another nice walk this morning, though a bit greyer and cooler than yesterday. The woods are leafing out beautifully though - it won't be long before everything will be bursting with greenery.

I had a few folks sign up to my newsletter yesterday, after I said I'd no longer be posting every single daynote on social media. While that was very nice, I don't send my daynotes out via newsletter. That might change in the future, if I upgrade my newsletter software so I can segment and send daynotes to people who want to opt-in to them, but for the moment I don't want to show up in everyone's inboxes every day. If you would still like to follow my daily posts, I can heartily recommend an RSS reader. NetNewsWire is an excellent, free and open source one for Macs and iOS, and you don't even need an account, it can sync via iCloud. If you prefer web-based, here's some recommendations.

RSS is free, decentralised, chronological (no algorithmic nonsense) and extremely well-supported, and it's a great way to subscribe to a whole bunch of things, including blogs like mine.

ON DECK: A solid 1,551 words this morning, and I finished the first draft of my short story! I'm going to give it a polish tomorrow, then get it into the hands of my crit partners. I haven't written a short in aaaages (novels take a lot of time and effort to write, it turns out) and this was lots and lots of fun.

LISTENING: I greatly enjoyed this episode of What Went Wrong looking at the movie HEAT. I knew a few aspects of this (a friend of mine is a film studies scholar who specialises in Michael Mann) but I love how detailed these episodes are. Great stuff.

WATCHING: A bit more of RESIDENT ALIEN last night. We're in the final season now and it's a lot of fun. Goofy and affecting in equal measure.

READING: Digging into CHILDREN OF STRIFE by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) and I'm in my usual zone when I start a new Tchaikovsky novel of spending a fair amount of time just getting orientated within the formidable scope and scale of the worldbuilding. Fantastic stuff.

LINK: I missed much of the realtime coverage of the Artemis II mission, though I caught snippets and amazing images occasionally. But I was delighted that the amazing Youtube channel Melodysheep did a gorgeous 8K cinematic supercut of the mission. Watch this one on the biggest screen you can find.

UP NEXT: Feels a bit weird not to be posting this on social media, but I'm treating it as a bit of an experiment. In the future, I might experiment with having a daynotes email subscription (free) and a monthly newsletter (also free) along with a weekly essay feed (possibly paid?). I might also experiment with turning on comments, since my CMS/newsletter software Ghost has a built-in system. We'll see.

For now, though, if you're still reading these, thanks for sticking around.

Onward!