Several times over the past year, I have been encouraged to learn the video and audio editor (IDE? IME? Integrated media editor?) Davinci Resolve. After stewing on a particularly powerful pitch from Harald Achitz after the recording of Kodsnack 703, I eventually got around to downloading the whole package. It took me a while longer to read up on features, and finally decide to buy the studio version before I actually got around to learning to do anything.

Why so many steps before starting? I had a very particular target in mind: being able to ditch Descript for creating clips of Kodsnack. Descript is a completely web-based editor as a service. It keeps creeping up in monthly cost, sometimes forcing me to update, sometimes leaving me behind with fewer features as it goes.

(Oh, and they are AI everything, around every corner, and want you to pay for tokens.)

I do very simple things with my clips, but the one feature I needed and required to be reasonably simple was the creation of captions. I want my clips to have captions moving along with the speech, and that is nothing I want to create by hand.

In Resolve, this turned out to be nice and simple, once you found it. Resolve decided to bundle transcription and caption creation under "AI" features and only enable it in the for-pay studio version. Happily, the studio is a prodly advertised one-time purchase, and a quite affordable one at that. So this is why I did not start actually editing anything before buying.

Studio installed, it was time to set off! Starting to fumble around in Resolve felt … strange and awkward in a good way, if that makes any sense. It was a long time since I felt so lost in a new app, but it felt great to be figuring out something which is completely made for professional use. Things may not be easy to find, but everything is set up with the goal of being efficient.

As usual when learning something new, it felt very intimidating and slow at first. I made very strange mistakes, the kind which feel completely baffling as they happen. The kind you stop making after learning just a little bit more. And once you have done that little bit of learning, it becomes hard to understand what you even did wrong in the first place.

The key for me was watching a few videos, first a general walkthrough of pretty much the whole app, then a few on specific topics as they came up. I found a video specifically on creating clips for Tiktok which really clicked for me. It both answered the main questions I had at the moment, and showed me a bunch of power user setup. Got to love a fifteen-minute video which still spends a minute or two at the start showing you how to set up some useful keyboard shortcuts.

Somewhere soon after watching that video, I stumbled out of the forest of total confusion and into the plain of things starting to make sense. I have created my first clip which looks and feels the way I want it, and I know the steps I want to do and their order so that it feels repeatable. From here, it is just a matter of building habit and speed, and adding new knowledge if and when I want it. There is a whole universe of extra things to learn, and I am excited about the thought of possibly having my own library of effects and setups and things.

We will see where it goes from here, but the initial stage of confusion is definitely over.

(I can leave Descript behind for editing, but annoyingly they also provide the recording solution I use at the moment. They are in the process of enshittifying that, too, so my motivation is high, I just need to figure out to what first …)

I decided to not read a book.

It may not be a first for me, but it is definitely much too rare that I actively decide to stop reading a book. I can leave them around for a long time, sometimes eventually giving up on them. But the giving up is very rare, and a light sense of guilt that I should be finishing them is very easy to awaken.

I am therefore happy to report that I am not finishing Ken Follet's Never. I started it with some hesitation. I know that I can enjoy his writing quite a bit, but I also realized rather quickly that he is such a bastard to his characters. In a medieval story where the plague plays a part, do we really need a detailed description of someone being flayed alive? (If I recally correctly, it was also a total side note to the whole rest of the story.) How much rape do we strictly need to make the story come alive? Does every evil character have to get away with all their bad deeds all the way to the end?

I am not sure why exactly I started to see Follet as the evil puppet master when I have never thought of any other author like that. Perhaps I liked some of the good characters too much? Perhaps starting stories with literally putting someone's feet to the fire and randomly killing somebody's puppy was choosing to start uphill?

Or perhaps I have simply had enough of all the dumb evil shit idiots all over the world get away with daily? I do not mind if my fiction includes a bit more of the wrath of the heavens descending on evil-doers than does the flow of news.

I chose to stop Never when I realized how likely a horrible story of human trafficking centered around a woman and her child were to play a central part of the story.

Sorry Ken, I do not feel like bracing myself before my evening reading right now.

(The annoying part is that I am pretty interested in the bigger story of the book. Oh well.)

I have a bit less than a week to go until my summer holiday starts, and I already feel very much in holiday mode. In sync with soon turning off the alarm for a couple of weeks, trying to not feel like I need to do too much during the days, tricky stuff like that.

I think I can do fine at it this year. Some years it feels hard to get into the right mindset, but this time I think I have it.

Which, yes, probably means I will completely fall out of it in some strange way. I will deal with that when it happens.

For now, I am quite happy tapping away at my keyboard on a Thursday night, having had an evening meal in the setting sun with some alcohol to go along with it.

Completely as if tomorrow was not a work day, and also somehow completely fine with tomorrow being one.

Is this not the kind of feeling I tend to have toward the end of a holiday? "Oh, I should try to hold on to this relaxed state of mind when work starts again."

Surely it can not be a bad thing to start that feeling early?

Moments when it is easy to fall out of the podcast editing session:

• Before I have started
• When I have dragged all tracks into Hindenburg and lined them up
• When I have found the episode starting point and removed everything before it
• When I realize that something will need to be added or treated in a special way, breaking the standard flow

Dependency chains are fun. Yesterday was the first time I ever edited a Kodsnack episode because I realized I needed to get the episode image drawn. Drawing the image means I need the episode title (and, preferably, some additional idea from the topics to base the image on).

And so: the need to edit before I am able to draw.

There is a lot of time to finish up the actual episode, but what I realized was that this was the last opportunity where I had convenient access to my usual drawing tools.

So, the dependency chain brought me here, where I have maybe fifteen minutes of work left to do before publishing the episode next week. And that feels great! I should finish things early more often!

… except life and late changes of plans and information and everything else of course. But apart from that? Getting stuff done early just feels so good whenever it happens.

Today is also a day off, and I have exactly zero commitments. I spent and eternity (measured in my own relative time) this morning just having a cup of tea and listening to the rain, feeling the need to do nothing at all.

I hope and aim to keep that feeling all day.

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I sort of knew this already, but this week's episode of Econtalk brought self interruptions to the front of my mind. They discussed focus and interruptions, and then the guest (David Epstein) mentioned that your mind gets to used to interruptions that, even if you are left alone, you will tend to interrupt yourself with a distraction at about the same time intervals you are used to.

That rings true to me, and I have been thinking about when and how I interrupt myself during the week. I have not necessarily been any better at stopping myself, but I have at least noticed. A further realization is that I think my self interruptions are setting my focus interval to a much higher degree than any external forces.

This annoys me. I have been attempting to deal with this - so many times - by closing tabs, cancelling services, screen time, and all the other classics. But perhaps it can be easier to make progress if I just focus on the interval? I do not have to cut anything out (which could also avoid the classic of just replacing one distraction with another) - if I just focus on switching to any distraction slightly less often. Small changes are easier, and just trying to move in the right direction instead of hitting some hard target leaves much less opportunity to declare failure and just give up.

That could work, right? It sure will not hurt to try.