Mini-review: Moonfleet

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Classic and hugely atmospheric smuggling and treasure hunting adventure set in Dorset. Fast paced and stylishly written with the only the occasional bit of archaic language to stumble over. In Trenchard and Block, Falkner has created an admirable hero and mentor who never ever give up despite their various follies and mistreatment at the hands of others.  For all the derring-do though, it's a sombre book and repeatedly returns to the theme of loss.

Only the ending feels a little pat and fairy tale, but is perfectly in keeping with similar stories of the era. To my mind, this gives Robert Louis Stevenson a serious run for his money in the boys own adventure stakes.

Mini-review: Birch water

I like to experiment with new tastes and have a not-often-achieved goal of trying something new food wise every week.

This week, I happened upon Birch water for 99p a 250ml bottle in Home Bargains. As an aside, Home Bargains is quite a good place to seek out new flavours as a surprising amount of remaindered and heavily discounted weird and wonderful food and drink turns up there.  I find something in amongst the cut price biscuits etc about once a month on average.

As for Birch water itself? It's water with an extremely subtle sweet taste and a slightly cloying one. The bottle is glass with a metal cap which is a plus point from a recycling point of view.

But I'm not sure I'll seek it out again...

Thought: Comic books as a Minimum Viable Products for films

A recent episode of Start up mentioned some of the story/series based licensing deals Gimlet are doing - and my ears pricked up at the suggestion that Marvel had essentially used their comic books as a low cost test bed for their characters before turning them into films.

ALEX: How big do you think this line of business could be.

CHRIS: And in my mind it’s massive. Like in my mind it’s the thing that could turn Gimlet into a unicorn. And beyond because if you look at I mean there are many many many examples of multibillion dollar film and TV production companies and studios. There there aren’t any of the audio companies. And so I think you know there are precedents for this like you look at Marvel which was just a comic book company and you know it’s the same sort of model of originating characters and worlds and stories in a low-cost experimental format. Transitioning it to a higher investment higher return format.

ALEX: In other words, transitioning this character — me — in this world — the low-cost podcast environment you’re listening to right now — to this higher return format.

And it got me thinking, "How could charities massively scale up the income from their IP through licensing?" No immediate thoughts yet, but it's an interesting problem to consider.

Mini-review: Habit Stacking

Habit stacking is consists of a few ideas strung together to amplify their impact:

• Find something small which can be routinely done (habit)to improve an aspect of your life ( health, spirituality, career, finance, leisure, relationship & organising!)
• Attach it to an existing routine (like brushing your teeth) or trigger (when you feel down).
• Add additional habits until you've built a stack over time.

It turns out that I've been doing this for a while already e.g. my morning routine when I'm at home tends to look something like this:

• Wake up
• Go to bathroom
• Brush teeth
• Make green tea
• Feed the wormery with veg scraps
• Do some washing up
• Do some recycling
• Stack fruit and veg by microwave (to ensure 5+ a day)
• Drink tea
• Do some yoga stretches
• Do some kettle bell swings
• Do 7 minute workout

And there is some rationale to it all. For example, I tend to be rather stiff in the morning and walking around the kitchen/garden completing a few tasks tends to loosen things up enough to contemplate the workout.  More generally, it takes much of the cognitive load away freeing up your mind to think about other things instead.

What was new to me in the book was:

• Adding similar routines to other parts of the day e.g. lunchtime, end of work day and also using triggers e.g. particular emotions. 
• Elephant habits. Similar to Tracey's Eat that frog approach where you break down an unappealing task into small sections. Making this a habit was new.
• Broken windows. I had come across this in Gladwell's Tipping Point with regards to crime, but hadn't considered applying it to housekeeping. 

The book also encouraged to tackle a couple of things I've been meaning to do for a little while:

• Set up a direct debit for council tax. 
• Find an app to track all of my bank accounts/credit cards in one place. 

For the second of these, I used Money Dashboard rather than Mint as I'm based in the UK.  As an aside, I'm rather impressed with Money Dashboard so far and I like the ability to tag transactions in a particular way as well as create budgets for and track particular types of spending. For example, I tend to buy quite a few second hand blu-rays (often only paying a quid or so for them) for viewing on our projector and I wanted to just keep half an eye on my spending in this area.

Lastly, a word for Scott's personal writing style which made this a very easy and appealing read.

 

Mini-review: Ashes & Diamonds

Post-war Polish film which uses the journey a particular individual takes in terms of emotions, changing loyalties and priorities to tell in microcosm the country's own story. There's a number of memorable scenes which felt familiar from later Hollywood fare - even the blu-ray cover resembles the Schwarzenegger movie poster pose in Terminator 2.  Acting is also generally very good and aiming for realism, although feels little mannered at times.  Lastly, worth bearing in mind that the film assumes you are familiar with the context i.e. last day of the Second World War in Poland - which 70+ years later is unlikely. Reading the booklet enclosed with the blu-ray or relevant wikipedia entry may help increase your enjoyment from the film.

Who was inspired by who?

Mini-review: Beethoven

Harmless dog comedy has its moments (it's a rare appearance for Stanley Tucci's hair), but undemanding and uninvolving stuff overall. I don't think I'll be watching the other films unless some small people demand I do.

Mini-review: Calm Down!: Step-by-Step to a Calm, Relaxed, and Brilliant Family Dog

I don't have a dog, but I regularly encounter them while out running. Most are friendly, but there's a couple who are not so I have a vague interest in how to manage or even reform them.  This was a Kindle freebie so I thought I'd read it to get an insight into dog behaviour.

The key insights were:

• Regular treats are great behavioural tools. Up to 1 every second or so for new behaviours. 
• Let the dog discover the desired behaviour which results in a treat. 
• Rewarding partial behaviour initially is OK. 
• Use treats rather than punishment to reinforce the behaviours you want to see. 

It's probably not going to help with the causal encounters I have as I can't treat those dogs in  sustained way, but maybe it can be applied in another way. 

I also wonder if this can be applied to humans...