Category: Writingthoughts

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Hello From The Day Job

Secrets behind the Real World! etc.: I wrote a story for Digital Trends that, in the end, I couldn’t actually use today. So I thought I’d let you see it here, instead. Enjoy…?

Exercise isn’t just good for the body, a new study suggests; it also helps mental agility in later life. Which means, yes, now you have two reasons to feel guilty about failing to make it to the gym today.

The study comes from a team led by Dr. Alex Dregan from King’s College London in which more than 9,000 participants were tracked for decades to see the effects of regular amounts of exercise on the human body. Those taking part in the study were regularly interviewed to monitor both their levels of exercise and physical activity, but also their mental agility in terms of learning capability, attention and focus and strength of memory. According to the results, those who had been exercising more than two or three times a month since age 11 ended up scoring higher in mental tests at the age of 50 than those who had not.

(Sadly, the study – the findings of which were released Tuesday in the journal Psychological Medicine – didn’t contain information about the mental health benefits for those of us who gave up on exercise for their twenties because PE was just that traumatic, but eventually returned to it because, well, aging.)

According to Dregan, the results underscore the necessity for people to increase their amount of physical activity. “As exercise represents a key component of lifestyle interventions to prevent cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer,” he said, “public health interventions to promote lifelong exercise have the potential to reduce the personal and social burden associated with these conditions in late adult years.”

The problem, he suggests, may be that exercise is often presented as an all-or-nothing option when that doesn’t have to be the case in reality. “Not everyone is willing or able to take part in the recommended 150 minutes of physical activity per week,” he said, referring to the British government guideline amount of exercise for adults aged 19 through 64 years of age (Yes, there is really one government-suggested amount of exercise for a forty-five year span of time. It’s probably best not to dwell on that, however). “For these people any level of physical activity may benefit their cognitive well-being in the long-term and this is something that needs to be explored further. Setting lower exercise targets at the beginning and gradually increasing their frequency and intensity could be a more effective method for improving levels of exercise within the wider population.”

If you find yourself more concerned with the long-term mental benefits of exercise than the immediate physical gain, then Dr. Dregan believes that the kinds of exercise you enjoy may impact the levels of future clarity of thought; judging from information in the study group, it appears that intense levels of exercise and activity resulted in stronger mental agility in increased age compared with those who had enjoyed more moderate exercise while younger.

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Reports of My Demise Were Only Slightly Exaggerated

It’s been a week, people.

I don’t mean that in the literal sense – Well, I do, I guess; I am talking about the last five days of work, which is technically a week in the work sense if you want to be technical and all. But what I really mean is, it’s been a rough week; I got sick last weekend through what was nothing more than just overwork and overstress and exhaustion, and then that just didn’t really have a chance to go away, because I had the kinds of deadlines and workloads in front of me that I had to break my “No Work On The Weekend At All” rule in order to just keep my head above water… which meant that, robbed of the chance to destress for a couple of days, I was just under-powered and increasingly overwhelmed all the time this week.

That happened at the time when I had to go a couple of bigger-than-usual stories – interviews, really – for Wired (One about streaming video and the growth of the audience on tablet devices, and another about MonkeyBrain Comics and their new print titles) that had particular hand-in deadlines that couldn’t be switched or changed, as well as an increased workload for Newsarama because of the death of Batman’s sidekick (Instead of the one front page news story for them per week, in addition to my daily blogging duties, I had two and a half: here, here and here) and my regular Time essay, which was also connected with the deceased Boy Wonder. In almost every case, the work-as-handed-in and the work-as-published were considerably different, due to the editing process that’s almost always a good thing but also means that there’s a bunch of stuff that was written and didn’t see print this week, moreso than usual.

(For those curious about my workload: There’re also daily blog posts for Digital Trends, another handful of Wired pieces – including some that still have to run, and I think are showing up this weekend? – and the final Food or Comics for Robot 6 from this week, too. I also had to do the Comix Experience store catalog from scratch last weekend, which was a bear this month for some reason, and the Wait, What? podcast, which remains the highpoint of my work week.)

All of which is to say: I know, I know; I’ve been very quiet here lately, but it’s not by choice, I promise. Just as I owe people emails (Sorry, Adam, David and Lauren – Soon, I promise!), I owe this blog all kinds of attention. Hopefully, things will be less crazy this upcoming week, and we’ll get back to something resembling normal service. We can but hope, right…?

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Look, Up In The Belated Sky!

It’s one of those weeks where, try as I might, work is bleeding into the weekend – I worry that next weekend may be the same, which is particularly depressing, as it means no days off for the foreseeable, and also that I’ll probably have to skip ECCC after all – and, completely lost in the swamp of stuff I had to do last week, my Time piece appeared on Thursday. At the request of the editor, I am switching formats towards a more “Why [X] is [Awesome/Terrible/Better Than That Other Thing]” approach, starting with a piece about why Superman deserves more respect as a concept. Unsure how this one went, and unsure how much of that unsurety – which has to be a word, right? – is down to me and how much down to discomfort with the format. File under “We Live, We Learn, We Move On,” I think.

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You May Think That, But I Couldn’t Possibly Comment

My big Wired post for the day was this review of House of Cards, the new Netflix-only TV show that was released today. I’m unsure whether I really am happy with it; I feel like I rushed it in order to make deadline, and there are thoughts that I’m not sure I necessarily explained properly (or even explored properly). Nonetheless, there was something… thrilling, almost, in long-form review-writing like that. It’s opportunities for things like that make writing for Wired particularly exciting, and I hope I get to do more of it, to be honest.

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Braainnsssssss

A day later than usual thanks to the oddness that was Tuesday – A day which, by the way, has completely thrown off my internal clock for the entire week. Yesterday simultaneously felt like Tuesday and Thursday, and today feels like a Wednesday. God knows what tomorrow will feel like. I’m just holding on until the weekend – here’s this week’s Time essay, about zombies as romantic and sexual leads. Unusually, there was a lot cut out of this one at the last moment (Pretty much as much as made it in, to be honest), but it’s been cut in such a way that there’s not really a worthwhile chunk of “deleted material” for me to run here. When that kind of thing happens, I always wonder just how much I end up overwriting these things…

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It Never Rains But

The odd flip of yesterday, today was insanely busy workwise, with the various delays of yesterday turning into a crush of thingtodo today; at one point, I was writing two articles, rewriting another and being taught about the back-end stuff necessary for me to post to Wired all at the same time, just because everything had to be done by a particular deadline. On the plus side, everything got done in time, and my Wired story was apparently the #1 story on the site after it went up, which was… nice? And an entirely welcome boost to my writerly ego after yesterday’s hurry-up-and-wait bump. These new work rhythms are going to take some time to get used to, I suspect.

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Grindhouse

Man, I’m not sure today could have gone stranger if someone had tried to make it that way. Without going too much into work-related detail, it was one of those days when things didn’t go anywhere close to plan, with delays on some things, complete rethinks on other things, and an unexpected waste of a morning in terms of working on something that ended up being unnecessary. Such things happen, of course, but them all happening on the same day ends up giving a particularly depressive, apathetic feel to that day, a sense of What am I doing? and Clearly, I made some wrong choices along the way.

Amusingly/not-really-amusingly, said frustrations happened on the same day that Kate was having a similarly rough day. We had lunch together, and pretty much just moaned at each other about the kinds of days when work gets you down so much that you want to walk away and come back when it’s better, but deadlines refuse to let you. Sometimes, being a freelancer is rough, and it’s normally down to this kind of thing; the feeling of being a particularly unimportant cog in a machine that you can’t quite see, or even understand the shape of.

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Goodbyee, Goodbyeee!

It’s been a weird day, Internet. Today, I’ve written my final posts for both Comics Alliance and SpinOff Online – although the latter won’t appear until tomorrow and Sunday, meaning that there’s always time for them to end up very outdated before anyone actually sees them, always a potential thrill with writing things ahead of time. This week, I also wrote my final column for Robot 6, all of this happening as I clear my schedule to start writing on a regular basis for Wired.com next week (Officially Tuesday, but we’ll see if I have any space in my schedule on Monday).

It’s a weird feeling, not having CA or SpinOff around anymore; it’s not really sunk in yet. For the last couple of years (Well, year, for CA), they’ve defined the rhythm of my work week and my deadlines in a way that was often frustrating and exhausting, but also somewhat comforting in the regularity: Five op-eds and ten news posts ever week (That’s in addition to the weekly Time essay, the Blog@Newsarama posts, the weekly Newsarama top 10 and my ten Digital Trends posts). I knew, for the most part, what I’d be writing every day, even if I didn’t know what I’d be writing them about, and there really was something to that. There were times when it was a grind coming up with that much information – those many words – week-in, week-out, don’t get me wrong, but there was also some… security, perhaps? Something welcoming about not being entirely lost at sea when it came to output, and knowing that the work was there, if that makes sense.

I didn’t write a farewell post on any of those sites; I came close, twice – The final Robot 6 column makes mention of creators moving on, which was intentional, and the closest I came to actually saying “Byeeee” – but it felt too vain and self-conscious. I don’t know if my absence on any of those sites will be noticed, or remarked upon (Knowing my success with the commentariat at SpinOff, I think it’ll be applauded), and I’m not sure that I want to know. Let those sites, and me, move on and do something else, instead.

(Ideally, I’d like to go back and do stuff for SpinOff and Comics Alliance again in the future, and have told the powers that be in both places that, so hopefully it’ll happen. And I also recommended replacements to both sites, in case they were looking; it’d be great if my recommendations get the gigs, but we’ll see.)

That ending and my resultant melancholy wasn’t the only thing that made today particularly unusual, though; because these things come in threes, today was also the day when I finally made good on my promise to draw D-Man for Dylan Todd (Something I promised earlier this week, but have been meaning to do for far, far longer) – I was, because it’s me, stupidly anxious about sending that to him because I was all “It looks terrible! Real artists have done stuff for that blog!” but he was kind enough to say it was good, bless him – and the day when I found out that I am thanked in the acknowledgments for an upcoming non-fiction book by a writer whose work I admire, but didn’t even think knew I existed, because of “smart things on the intercyberwebnet that helped [him] shape some of [his] thinking on the subject.”

So, yeah; weird day. January, my friends; it’s always a month that feels like a somewhat uncertain prelude for everything else that’s coming in the year ahead.