Welp, That's No Fun. (No Newsletter Today! 😭)

Oh dear.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Hi everyone! This is Mike from Everything is Amazing.

Today was going to be the start of season 5, leaping into the joyful, chaotic and infinitely surprising science of colours: what they are, what we think they are, what they do to our behaviour (with or without us knowing about it) and all sorts of other toe-wiggling weirdness. Here's where I first laid it all out.

But I'm going to be a few days late in getting started here…because this morning I knocked my laptop over. 😭

It made a, shall-we-say, highly information-filled *pop* when it hit the ground at exactly the wrong angle for laptops to hit any hard surface - and in line with my sudden dread, and despite me doing my best with it this evening, it looks like something critical in the hard-drive has ceased to be. Farewell, little laptop that definitely could (and did).

So. I have a new machine arriving hopefully tomorrow. It'll take me a day to get it set up, and then I'll should be back in action.

But apart from the sadness (I mean, this is the laptop I created Everything Is Amazing on!) and the pain of the unexpected expense of it all, there's something I'm very grateful about.

It is truly amazing how much less stressful this process is, compared to when a former laptop of mine died a decade ago - back when high-volume, cloud-based backups were too new a thing to reach a non-techie like me, when I was drafting everything locally in Word instead of using Google Docs, when my phone was so rubbish that there's no way I'd be typing this to you right now. And I feel sure that what I've lost, well, it's not the important stuff, which is safe on all these fancy new services that are so easy to take for granted these days. And right now, that means a lot.

It's all given me a little moment of thinking “damn, in this very very narrow sense, we came a long way towards a better future in these ten years, didn’t we?”

Anyway. I am rambling and I very much need sleep. But just to say, sorry about the delay, thanks for your patience - and to ensure you still have something to read, I've temporarily removed the paywall on last week's newsletter for paying subscribers, which is about artificial mountain-building. (Yes really, that’s a thing. Absolutely bonkers, mate. Click through and get a load.)

Back soon,

Mike