Cartoon Gravity 29
Crowley, Highland Pro, Sunday Supplement
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Let's start with the round-up of the journal entries this week:
- 2025-04-14 showcased a new Crowley design (see above) by Cartoon Gravity Club member Chris Prince, whose work is consistently great. We put that design onto some handsome merch which you can buy here: Aleister Crowley/The Beast by Chris Prince by Cartoon Gravity | Redbubble
- 2025-04-15 was a list of links to take our minds off of current affairs.
- 2025-04-16 was an experiment with the Lex AI writing app
- 2025-04-18 saw me musing on a business model for audio fiction, which I might expand upon in a future development hell piece.
The Crowley Kickstarter has now been in pre-launch for a week and, as of this moment, has 95 followers. Having not done this before, I have absolutely no idea if that is good or not. I know we'll need a lot more people to pledge when the thing launches, but 900+ people so far feels like a good start. The link to add your name to their number is here: Lovecraft Investigations: Crowley by Julian Simpson — Kickstarter.
Over the next week or so, I'll start announcing some of the rewards for the Kickstarter which, if you're into the Lovecraft Investigations, are pretty awesome - I'm really excited to get my hands on the samples.
One issue that's going to need to be resolved this week is what to do about US backers. Our digital rewards will be fine, but there are big questions over what to do about physical product shipping to the US - some courier companies are already refusing to ship to consumers in the States because the import paperwork has become nightmarish as King Donald (the First of His Name, King of the White Supremacists and the Golf-Cheats, Breaker of Markets, Persecutor of Minorities, and the Father of Idiots) spams random buttons on his tariff machine.
The last thing I want is for someone to pledge to our Kickstarter, only to discover that they have to mortgage their home to pay the delivery charges. So, if we can't figure out a way through this, I think the US offers might have to be digital-only.
This week has seen me messing around with a whole host of apps which, uncharacteristically, I'm not going to bore you with, save to say that xTiles is worth a look if you want something a little more creative in the organisational space, and the new Trello (which might be beta-only) now integrates pretty well with Google Calendar for time-blocking and finally has a global inbox. This is a game-changer for Trello, which might at last be realising its potential as the best task management app out there (Cal Newport has always sworn by it).
I like Trello because it lets me have an overview of every project I am working on/have delivered/is incoming and it lets me drill down into tasks, attachments, documents etc without ever getting lost. The new features are great, but I still prefer to link it into Sunsama for a calmer, more measured approach to time-blocking.
I'm also nearing the delivery point for a brand new US TV pilot, which I'm excited to get out there. I have a new set of reps out in the US who are super-keen, so it's nice to be able to toss them something brand new to play with. I'm also in the early stages of a new movie script, which I'm writing in the first-person because I hate to make anything easy for myself.
On the screenwriting front, I have recently been recommending Highland Pro but, full disclosure, I'm moving away from it for the time-being. Highland 2 was a brilliant screenwriting app, the best out there. Highland Pro promised to be that and more, with full functionality on iOS and iPadOS. But in reality, it doesn't work as advertised on mobile systems (it functions as a plain text editor, nothing more), and some key features that were essential to Highland 2 users no longer work on the desktop version of Pro.
Don't get me wrong, Highland Pro is still a hundred times better than Final Draft, but it is, alas not yet better than its predecessor. The Discord channel for the app is full of people complaining and there is not much in the way useful responses beyond "fixes are coming". I get it, Highland was the brainchild of screenwriter and podcaster John August and he is not a software engineer and I'm sure the last thing he wants to be doing is running a software company BUT if you're going to charge people a subscription for a new app, it really needs to do what you said it could do.
It's not great timing for this app either, because (beat), which is the creation of Finnish screenwriter Lauri-Matti Parppei, is growing in popularity. It works very similarly to Highland Pro (except it works), has a host of really neat plugins and is FREE for desktop. The iOS version you have to pay for, but it's lot cheaper than Highland and it functions perfectly. I have moved a project over from Highland Pro to (beat) and I'm not sure how willingly I'll go back, even if they fix Highland.
My TV Pilot is now in Arc Studio, which continues to go from strength to strength and also works very well on mobile.
Sunday Supplement
Is it time for some Sunday reading? I think it is... I have neglected MyMind recently, but in conversation with a friend this week, I was reminded of how much I used to love it. Here then, I present a dive into the MyMind vault...
Ashwin Rodrigues
Patrick Radden Keefe
Kate Mothes
Cat Rainsford
The Spaces Team
Ellery Weil
Kate Jerde
Liam Ward
Ryan Holiday
Kira M. Newman
And finally, this concept video of a nuclear-powered sky hotel. I have no idea why.
Fuck it. Send.