Weeknote 777: decided

This week I have learned:

if you pull your ears it helps to reduce pre-performance nerves. I learned this from a wonderful colleague, Letty, who has done much drama in her career.
having the framing that I learned from Kae Tempest’s interview last week about the trilogy of writer, reader and content helped hugely in the setup for the Random workshop on Tuesday.
I need to get better at responding to the question “what’s it for?” when people ask me about the book. The answer is that life is an experiment with the generalised hypothesis: “Something interesting might happen?” Random the Book and Random the Workshop are tools to help test that hypothesis. If someone doesn’t get anything from it, I’ve disproven the hypothesis for that person.
building digital interactivity into in-person activities is my new thing. The possibilities are endless and fascinating and interesting things will happen.
I’m also really into building little apps that let me do things I’ve been putting off or just didn’t have time for. Oblique Business Strategies is one. I’ve also put together a little app that allows me to capture weeknote thoughts as I go through the week.
sometimes you just need to make a choice and move forward. I bloody well know this – it’s one of the things that has come out of the book work. There’s no right answer, just pick something and start iterating.
good grief, video generation using AI has come on in leaps and bounds. Been playing around with LTX.
that there’s a difference between being replaced by AI and finding that the work that you do is on a technology replaced by AI. https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2026/04/23/what-do-you-actually-do/
that it appears to be cheaper to travel the length of the West Coast of Africa than to go through the Suez Canal. Which kind of makes sense. I’m learning loads from watching the progress of the book.
I’m designing a new workshop and this week have been simulating it using Claude to create a handful of characters to go through it step-by-step. It’s fascinating, and a really curious way to refine a design.
that apparently someone who writes a book about randomness that’s designed in a way that can be read in any random order that then designs a workshop that allows random people to read random pages from said book might not be, and I’ll tread carefully here, entirely neuro-typical.
I’ve now written an app that allows me to capture my weeknotes over the course of the week. This might decrease their brevity.

The week in media:

Saw:

The film The Grand Budapest Hotel for the first time. It’s delightful.
The film Legend for the first time. It’s horrific yet fascinating.
The first few episodes of Leonard and Hungry Paul. It’s enchanting and gentle in the way that The Detectorists is enchanting and gentle.
The most joyous of things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKn0FKbi_Ig

Listened: