If I were a lifestyle vlogger in lockdown

Hi guys, welcome back to my channel!

It’s a bank holiday Monday so I thought I’d do a low-key, day-in-my-life vlog, with maybe a get-ready-with-me and what-I-eat-in-a-day. Later I might even trying-on-everything-I-own and closet-clearout.

It’s really important to have a morning routine, and you all know I’ve been reading The Power of Habit, so I have been trying to cultivate little rituals to start my day right. Currently I like to lie in bed for several hours staring at my phone and contemplating my own mortality. I’m trying not to focus on the news too much, so instead I spent a while reading gossip about fashion bloggers I used to follow back in 2009. It makes me feel very centred and present.

Filming my life, one second at a time

Long, long ago, I spent the evening of 31 December 2019 with my family. As midnight approached, we all stared at the clock, preparing to count down to the start of the new decade.

My brother’s girlfriend grabbed her phone. She wanted to film the countdown – not the whole thing, just the last second.

The second, she explained, was for an app called 1 Second Everyday. 1SE is essentially a video journal. It gives you a calendar to populate with individual one-second videos, then compiles them into a montage. It lets you document your life, not for social media, but for your own satisfaction and reflection. She showed us her 2019 video – fragments of her reading books, meeting friends, running for the bus – all together building a vision of her everyday life.

This sounded like fun to me. I didn’t know if I’d stick with it, but I downloaded the app anyway, then went outside and filmed one second of fireworks.

My month in books: April 2020

This month’s reading had it all. Bison! Romance! Killer plants from Soviet Russia!

Outside the world of books, things have been shit for obvious reasons. This definitely had an impact on what I chose to read and how I dealt with it. But at least I’m finally making a dent in my to-read pile, now that it’s less easy to replenish it.

Let’s tour my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island!

It’s been less than four weeks since Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out, and I’ve already played more than 135 hours of it. For years, I’d been saying that when this game came out, I wouldn’t want to do anything else – I wanted to stay on my sofa with the Switch, never leaving the house, ignoring everything else in my life.

And another finger on the monkey’s paw curled. Sorry folks, I guess this was my fault.

For those of you who’ve somehow avoided the Animal Crossing frenzy of the past month, it’s a series of games which comedian Ron Funches once described as “I am the human mayor of an animal town”. In New Horizons, you are the “island representative” rather than the mayor, but it’s pretty much the same. You settle on a deserted island with your talking animal buddies – mine is named Sugarloaf. Then it’s up to you to develop the island, plant flowers, decorate your house, go fishing, and so on. It all plays out in realtime and the island changes with the time of day and the seasons. The game is very, very chill, and I think everyone agrees the timing of its release really couldn’t be better.

New Horizons has some new features for the series which I was very excited about: you can place furniture outside, and you can terraform the island. (I have ascended from Mayor to God.) So much of my 135+ hour playtime has been spent decking my island out, and making it a nice place to putter around catching butterflies and doing the gardening.

I am pretty proud of how it is looking now, so I thought I’d do a tour and show off what I’ve been working on.

My month in books: March 2020

Well. This was a month.

While I spent most of March indoors, I actually didn’t do all that much reading. This is mostly because my time was occupied by Animal Crossing. But I did manage to get through four rather different novels.

Going to the movies, a lot

Two exciting things happened in my life recently: I went down to four days a week at work, and I got an unlimited cinema pass.

So this means I have been going to the movies a lot.

My month in books: February 2020

Overall, this was kind of a disappointing month for reading. I finished five books, and some were good, but none of them really knocked my socks off in the way that January’s highlights did.

Screaming about Neal Stephenson and wolves in the middle of the night

As I write this, it is 1.30am, and I cannot sleep.

Inside me, there are two wolves, and the wolves are locked in an eternal battle.

The battle is because one of the wolves thinks Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is great, and the other wolf thinks it’s shit.

This war has been raging for two years now, ever since I read the book, and it still drives me to distraction on a regular basis, and so here is a blog post to try to settle this furious internal disagreement and make the wolves shut up.

My month in books: January 2020

It’s been too long since I talked about books. Hooray for books! Here’s what I’ve been reading this month – six very different novels, although there is something of a fantasy theme. Plus one genuine five-star, loved-it, oh-my-god-this-is-incredible book.

Half-ass things in 2020

In my last post, I wrote about New Year’s Resolutions and the allure of setting goals for a self-transformation. I concluded that while I wasn’t going to give up on this entirely, I was going to try to change my approach to it. I wanted my goals to be things I enjoyed doing, not things I felt like I should be doing.

So, with that in mind, here are my 6 goals for 2020.