Pete's March 2025 update

A lot of hot air 🎈🎈 | Useless 🔫🔫 | Dog 🕶️ and Detroit 🐣

I got to work early last week and raced to the rooftop to capture the hot air balloons. 😍

We’ve been slowly re-watching The X-Files in black and white, and have taken to using Wikipedia’s “critical reception” section to guide us on bad episodes to skip. There are many bad ones, but the good ones are still good.

Guns are useless in The X-Files. Nobody respects them. FBI agents point guns at suspects and they barely pause before running or fighting. Drawing pistols is a shorthand for danger lurks. It’s like an improv scene where the players have just been told: raise the stakes! A strange incongruence: the stronger the protagonist makes themselves, the more the audience perceives the situation as dangerous. Yet the guns do nothing. Oh, is that a gun? *Perp spews slime, runs out the back door.* Someone draws a gun in almost every episode, and they’re never the ones in control of the situation. They reach for their holsters because they’re scared.

Nutmeg update

Nutmeg’s first physio visit in Australia was a success. She got treats, and chicken, and massages, and—her favourite—lasers.

And we got praise for how far she has come and all the work we did to get her there. 😅

Startups and work update

I have a really nice mix of work right now. Three days at Paddl, in the office, working with a small team to run a program and curate content and develop a new product strategy and sales materials and storytelling. It’s intense but rewarding, and it lets me directly apply my skills and experience while still learning new things. Then two (less-structured) days from home, startup coaching and Startup Dunedin team work and other admin.

I regret starting a company in NZ. It was unnecessary—I could have been a sole trader—and a lot of extra admin and the need for an accountant to do year-end stuff. The NZ financial year ends 31 March and if all goes to plan my company will be officially closed by then and it will be the last year I need to submit all the tax palaver. And, importantly, the last time I need to pay an accountant thousands of dollars to do it for me.

Fiction update

A pretty good month of writing. I’ve started writing on my phone while waiting for the tram and other little gaps. Got a new story and new flash started that way, and it made it easier to get my head into the story and jump straight into writing when I got some desk writing time. Those 2 newbies are doing the submission rounds now. One of them features a hot air balloon ride.

13 submissions in March.

I can’t really go any harder on submissions until I write more stories. Most of my stories have done the rounds already or are tied up in long submission queues waiting to be considered. I have 14 stories that I’m shopping now: 3 reprints, 11 original. I think maybe 3 of those originals are sellable.

Read / Watch / Listen

• [Read: 5 minutes] I never realised that Cabaret was more than a fun, campy musical. Huh. Great article here on the role of comedy in propaganda.

• [Watch/listen: 5 minutes] This is a very wholesome story about fairy letters and parenting.

• [Watch: 10 minutes] Raising chickens in Detroit.

Correction: Feb. 16, 2024

An earlier version of this article described Lactobacillus incorrectly. It is a genus of bacteria, not yeast.

— NYTimes editor

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/16/opinion/sourdough-bread-starters-pandemic.html