Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I just got two new huge jobs. I've nuked my Twitter archive, deactivated Facebook, gone read-only everywhere, and am basically dead to the world for at least the next few months, and possibly until 2019.

The worst thing is that I had another idea during the week and spent my lunch break on Saturday working out the shape of it.  

These are the times when Dwayne Johnson shows up on Instagram with another of his motivational posts and I'm like "fuck you, you have an entire fucking team, and this here is just me and a laptop and a phone and a whiteboard, you giant bastard." That guy has a personal stylist for clothes for getting off a plane in.  I'm lucky if I can even find a shirt in the morning.

I still haven't put my travel bag back together and I'm heading up to York in the week to do my Visiting Professor gig again.

After three weeks of just crushing work/time insanity, I've put Wordpress back on the home page of my phone and have committed to morning.computer no longer being written in the actual mornings.  Also I still hate how fucking dumb iTunes is.  New computer.  iTunes won't sync new music to my phone without deleting all the old music and playlists.  It's idiocy.  (I have ended up importing the iTunes library file in from the old computer and doing an "assisted fit" on my keyboard. ("Assisted fit" is an old builder's term for hitting something with a hammer until it goes in.)  The universe hates me.

I have a new travel bag from LOT 2046 to break in.  If you see a large confused man wandering around York snarling at the zombie swarms of tourists lurching around the Chocolate Trail, there's a fair chance it will be me.

Dwayne Johnson hasn't got one of those, has he?  Fuck you, Rock.

(Actually, I like the Rock. He works fucking hard.)

This is a shorter one, this week. Because, hey, I don't have a team.  I don't even have time to email people for interviews or guest op-eds or all the other things I used to do. This is the Acceleration, and sometimes it's just us on our own.  You need to get next to that and be okay with that.  On the bright side, it means you get to listen to the music you like, as loud as you like.

I had to send in a story document the other day and noted that if it seemed a little off, then, well, I'd been listening to nothing but German experimental music of the 1970s while writing it.  The exec got back to me with, "this is fine, but... we don't have to listen to it too, do we?"

So.  INFINITY WAR, then.  No spoilers.

It is perhaps best understood as an unprecedented brand power move.  It is not "a film" as that term is commonly understood.  It is a sequence of connections.  It's a statement from a bizarre place of popular-culture ownership.  It's a statement that they have done ten years of film storytelling, often with very conventional story templates, so that everyone in the world will show up for what is often an extraordinarily unconventional story-like event with one extremely unexpected tonal shift.

It, by design, makes no sense unless you've watched most if not all of the other Marvel films. There cannot be a casual viewer of this emanation.  Only a committed one.  It is likely to be the largest worldwide opening of all time, as I write this, even though it's not opening in China or Russia this weekend.

The production values are near-perfect.  The days of the slightly janky AVENGERS special effects are long gone, and every pixel is painted with jewelled, exquisite skill. As a visual experience, it is peak Marvel.  The mocap on Josh Brolin makes Thanos a far more effective "CGI villain" than the waste of Ciaran Hinds on JUSTICE LEAGUE, which had all the performance nuance of a level boss in DOOM II.

Per the trailer, I think it was a brave choice to have the evil spaceship apparently designed by James Dyson.

The writers and the directors worked very, very hard to make something that did not feel beholden to rules.  They'll stop the thing dead for sixty seconds to do a gag. There are a lot of gags. I mean, no possible joke goes unjoked. Nothing I say here should be taken to denigrate the work of those people. They have achieved a remarkable thing.

(Special nod to whoever designed the sonics for the next-to-final scene.)

It is not a movie. It is a brand manifestation that wants to have prolonged, eager and reasonably skilled cultural sex with you. It wants your experience with its content™ to be satisfying and it hopes you are pleased enough to return for further interaction with the Brand.  This is a very 21C thing.  I like it for that alone, to be honest.

AVENGERS 4 happens next year, of course, and I will be interested to see how they stick the landing. But, in terms of cultural power plays, this one is the pinnacle.

Grouper has a new album.  You need to know nothing else.

Writer/producer friend Julian Simpson has a three-part radio serial at the BBC called MYTHOS, and if you liked INJECTION, this is going to be extremely your shit.

Mary Lairre (Nicola Walker), the ghost of a sixteenth century French nun murdered at Borley Rectory and rendered corporeal by the mysterious Department, is joined by Parker (Phoebe Fox), a character whose magical abilities rely upon her transforming her entire personality as circumstances require. Mythos is a series that looks at British folklore through a quasi-scientific prism. It's laced with sardonic humour, ridiculous situations and insane leaps of logic - but its foundations lie in the stories that have become part of the British cultural DNA over the last two thousand years."

Writer Leigh Alexander, beloved of this parish, has a new short story up.

Via Wayne Chambliss: a pair of handguns made from a 4.5 billion year old meteorite.

I just read issue 44 of NIGHTWING, written by my friend Ben Percy.  I'd never normally read NIGHTWING, but Ben sent it to me, and he's my friend, so.

It's like a classic old 70s DC comic run through Ben's novelist brain while Ben's brain is in a mangler with a mouldering boot-sale longbox and eight episodes of MAX HEADROOM and a season of BLACK MIRROR. It is all at once shockingly retro and eight minutes into the future. And comes up with the perfect solution for those difficult superhero costume changes.  If you're into superhero books, it's on sale May 2, and it's going to be the one where people will be saying "what the hell was that?"  And that is a good thing.

Cover by my INJECTION co-creator Declan Shalvey, too.

Big weird week again, yes? Just remember that you can turn most of it off when you need to, and defend yourself from the rest by recalling that the thundering shit tornado of the 21C hasn't killed you yet, and that no number of Kanye tweets will finish you off.  You're living in the Acceleration and it turns out that, yes, you can do this and look good doing it.  You're fine.  Stick with me.  Hold on tight.

Theme tune.