Intro

F1R57 P0ST!!1 / hello world

What’s happened? What’s happening?

• December-January is not exactly a write-off, but we allow for its irregularities
• I started using a personal site and newsletter to centralise my online presence and portfolio, via micro.blog
• I’ve defined a 6-project ‘creative slate’ for my writing, music, and other creative endeavours
• Completed a spec script and moved it off the slate, making room for another project

Why this?

I dunno, man; why anything?

I think modern social media might have conspired to hijack our precious time and attention. We have to get to the bottom of this!

[laugh_track.wav]

While I was looking into alternative social media models like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.), I encountered it in one word: POSSE. Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Despite attempting to ‘bring everyone together’, social media actually 1. silos and compartmentalises us as a fact of their design (ie. you don’t communicate with someone on Substack by posting on Instagram), and 2. forces us to post in particular ways to be seen.

I’m not a selfie guy. I’m not even a “use my camera in public” guy; I always feel like I’m intruding on the moment. (It’s fine if you do, though! I’m just hyperaware that some people don’t like being on camera, and might feel particularly standoffish about men with cameras; I actually love being in front of a camera as long as it’s not mine.) All this to say: I prefer to write than photograph or video, and that doesn’t really vibe with, uh, modern social media’s whole thing. (I’m looking into Substack and Letterboxd, don’t worry, but I can’t see myself consolidating my stuff there).

So, micro.blog stood out to me as a great choice to start implementing POSSE. It’s a personal site host first, and fully customisable using subpages, HTML and CSS. What that means is I can put up permanent and semipermanent portfolio pieces, “about this particular part of me” pages, and entire separate catalogues of content as I choose, keeping it all permanently connected to one place. As a microblogging platform, it automatically sends everything to Bluesky and Threads and a bunch of other services I haven’t connected yet. It also goes the other way, receiving stuff from external RSS feeds if I tell it to, as long as I can actually get the RSS version of something (not an easy task for, say, Instagram or my Steam reviews). On top of all that, the Categories system makes it easy to view all same-subject posts together. None of these features are anything especially new or impressive individually, but the way they work together here makes them greater than the sum of their parts, and exactly what I didn’t know I’d been looking for. I wish POSSE had been in my life in 2007.

Or, now that I think about who I was in 2007, maybe I’m glad it wasn’t.

Both?

GOALS

Because this is the first newsletter, I didn’t have formally stated goals to begin with. What will go here in future is a little report on the prior month’s SMART(ish) goals, established at the end of the last month(ish)’s newsletter.

The Forgotten Weeks, and housesitting

At the end of last year I completed an Advanced Diploma of Screenwriting, which took two years. The course was a chance to take the time I’d need to recover from burnout and make it gently productive; in-built structure and community, just enough stakes to get me rolling again, just enough resistance to rebuild some cognitive muscle. It was never about the paper; it was always about the experience.

The couple of weeks after handing in final assignments was a moment to rest, recuperate, and (most importantly) celebrate. Then, Christmas and New Year’s are always a messy, *non-*time. I further complicated it by agreeing to housesit for a few weeks (over Christmas, NYE, and the first couple of weeks of Jan). There were cats involved; I have no regrets.

The cats in question

I’d intended to use the time in Melbourne to do a whole lot of socialising, but not a lot of it happened and I may have accidentally ghosted some people. I’ve gotten a little too used to a secluded regional life, I suppose; the idea of wresting an entire social calendar out of the aether has started to feel scary and alien. I don’t like that\! I want my inner community-gatherer back\! I want to let out my inner goofball and be cringe on main\!

Toward the end of my housesit, there were some serious bushfires, one of which took out over 40 buildings; houses, sheds, and a few significant commercial buildings all just a five-minute drive up the road from home. I hadn’t been swimming or really exercising for the whole three weeks, either, so the stress got stored in my body for a few days.

It’s been two weeks since I got home. That time’s been dedicated to rebuilding a bunch of basic rhythms and laying groundwork for this — the post/newsletter you’re reading right now.

Set up the basic rhythm and templates for my personal site, goals, and life-after-coursework. (Case in point: the template behind this post!)

The personal site and newsletter are new things, and with new things there are systems to build and use, then teething issues to iron out. This all takes time, and while the current functions don’t require any serious HTML/CSS knowledge (right now it’s all prefabs and text, with some very basic exceptions), it’s all development.

So: as you’ll be able to see on the homepage, I’ve started posting regularly. As regularly as I can manage, about as many different types of things as I can manage while also working on things privately. It’s easier than I thought, but right now the media side is also very games-heavy (as compared to, say, films & TV or books). If the site’s going to fulfil its intended function (ie. regular updates), then this is where I post things first, with a few possible exceptions.

I’ve set up a spreadsheet for my creative slate. It needs tweaks, but I’ve successfully got it to automatically sort and output the Top 6 (the actual slate, excluding the backlog), then appropriately tag it with the HTML to generate a table. That means I can copy-paste it from the original sheet into this newsletter in seconds, not have to spend half an hour individually putting cell data between <code><td>\ tags.

What’s not done?

I still need to actually use the work I’ve done on the creative slate spreadsheet, and it’s guaranteed I’ll need to make tweaks and adjustments to the format to make it all slick. The same applies to the format of this newsletter.

I need to set up a similar spreadsheet to manage my contacts. This one is not for the site. No, my phone address book is not adequate — I need something that lays out how long it’s been since I last spoke to who.

I’ll need to add a bunch of samples, portfolio items and older works to the site, as well as improving how I present them. One of my site’s intended functions is to serve as a digital business card for my creative work, and that means it has a bunch of fronts to cover. That one’s the long game.

Take some stuff off the creative slate to make room for more

This one’s better-covered in the next section, but after making the initial table I did, in fact, finish an outstanding project to make room on my slate. I would have liked to finish two, but life comes at you fast. Even one is still a win.

CREATIVE SLATE

Previously:

'

Project	Ownership	Type	Synopsis	Next
The Simpsons, 'The Nuclear Family'	Matt Groenig & 20th Century FOX	Spec	When Lisa is wowed by an environmentally-friendly house, Homer tries to impress her with a portable nuclear generator.	Finish first draft
Wake	Sophie Spillane, Jamie Baxter, William Riordan, Mike Gorrie	Audio	Alex brings her girlfriend to her mother's funeral, but she hasn't come out to her dysfunctional family.	Third & final edit pass, marketing materials, distribution plan
N-Convenience, S1E06, 'This Message Finds You'	Jamie Baxter, Mike Gorrie, Nicholas Pergadis, Bianca Pritchard, William Riordan	Episode	Cat is anxious about taking PTO to attend her cousin's wedding. Manfred installs an automatic rostering system.	Finish Act 3, 4, 5
You Can't Let Go	Mike Gorrie	Feature	A young man in a time-loop saves his friends from a climbing accident. This fixes the time-loop, but he soon finds himself in another time-loop ... then another.	Complete first draft, then present at script read
No Words	Mike Gorrie	Short	An over-stretched couple must reconcile their differing ideas of how to use a "free weekend".	Storyboard & test shoots
Milking The Man, S1E01, 'Deep Cowpat Agent'	Mike Gorrie	Pilot	A burned-out ASIO agent returns to his family's farm, where he must sabotage the cows' attempts to unionise by posing as one of them.	Mark plot beats & scenes for revision, develop pitch materials

At the start of the Christmas season, I had a pile of potential projects on my plate. Most of them were unfinished scripts from the Adv. Dip, ones for which all the outlines and scene breakdowns were written and the final assignment was to submit a pagecount, regardless of whether that was a complete episode or film. I now have two years’ worth of those. I don’t intend to finish all of them, but I had a few favourites.

I also have a pile of other projects at varying stages between “half done” and “basically just a concept that I can’t seem to let go of”. They’re on a spectrum from “goofy little short film” to “4-season epic” or “series of novels”. It won’t ever be possible to see all of them through to fruition, but “which one to explore next” is always in question. I’m doing my best to keep the slate small and the goals achievable, usually to within 6-12 weeks of work.

Usually the idea will be to move a project to the “next stage” (ie. complete a first draft, or other achievable step), not “finish the project” (ie. write, produce, and release the film).

At the top of the initial slate was a mostly-completed Spec script from the first year of my screenwriting course, a goofy little Simpsons story in which I wanted to invert some classic Simpsons tropes (such as “Homer saves the plant from a nuclear meltdown”) while staying true to the ethos of the The Simpsons we knew in the 90s. I’d revised the outline and the scene breakdown multiple times before even putting down a word of dialogue, and after all that I’d put down about 30 pages of a script that promised to be about 40 pages. It’s a little long for an episode, to be sure, but a first draft should be — it’s always better to have a little too much material (and cut it down) than the reverse.

Now that I’ve finished that draft, writing a second draft is a possibility, but not a high priority — the exercise is done. On to other projects!

##The new state of my creative slate is shown here:

'

Project	Ownership	Type	Synopsis	Next
Home in Nautilus Bay	Michelle Doherty	Game	Grow your farming business in an idyllic, almost TV-esque beachside community.	Learn Inky & write basic character dialogue; learn FMOD and make basic Autumn track
Wake	Sophie Spillane, Jamie Baxter, William Riordan, Mike Gorrie	Audio	Alex brings her girlfriend to her mother's funeral, but she hasn't come out to her dysfunctional family.	Third & final edit pass, marketing materials, distribution plan
N-Convenience, S1E06, 'This Message Finds You'	Jamie Baxter, Mike Gorrie, Nicholas Pergadis, Bianca Pritchard, William Riordan	Episode	Cat is anxious about taking PTO to attend her cousin's wedding. Manfred installs an automatic rostering system.	Finish Act 3, 4, 5
You Can't Let Go	Mike Gorrie	Feature	A young man in a time-loop saves his friends from a climbing accident. This fixes the time-loop, but he soon finds himself in another time-loop ... then another.	Complete first draft, then present at script read
No Words	Mike Gorrie	Short	An over-stretched couple must reconcile their differing ideas of how to use a "free weekend".	Storyboard & test shoots
Milking The Man, S1E01, 'Deep Cowpat Agent'	Mike Gorrie	Pilot	A burned-out ASIO agent returns to his family's farm, where he must sabotage the cows' attempts to unionise by posing as one of them.	Mark plot beats & scenes for revision, develop pitch materials

Home In Nautilus Bay skips straight out of the backlog to the top of the list, insofar as the order matters (it doesn’t, in the scheme of things — the idea here is that the slate moves in parallel, even if it’s at different speeds). This is a friend’s project, and represents a huge learning opportunity in both the interactive writing and soundtrack design space.

NEXT STEPS:

The next 4-12 weeks, I have two priorities at the top of the creative slate. It’d be nice to get to more than that, but let’s start with what we know is manageable.

• Polish off Wake with a third editing pass, enabling us to set it up with a public release date.
  • This involves:
    • Adding an intro and outro (title, credits, etc.)
    • Revising and improving the musical score
    • Revision of sound effects
    • Lots of minor adjustments to timing and volume
• Create test dialogues and music for Home In Nautilus Bay
  • This involves:
    • Creating an original, suitable Autumn Theme that can then be layered for context-response
    • Writing basic dialogue events for key characters, mainly for the purpose of exploring what’s possible for the characters in the context of basic functionality
    • Learning (and re-learning) the basic functionality of both FMOD and Inkle, and how to align the above with their context-response functions in full context

This doesn’t sound like a ton of work, but any of these pieces could easily balloon out and become much bigger than its surface. I’m making an effort here to avoid over-committing to a tight deadline, even though my aim is to accomplish these tasks before March.

CALENDAR

'

Event Date	Type	Description	Done?
22 Dec 2025	IRL	Begin housesit	Done
13 Jan 2026	IRL	End housesit	Done
29 Jan 2026	IRL	Start back at internship	Done
01 Feb 2026	Target	Automated newsletter begins	Done
02 Feb 2026	IRL	Start choir rehearsals	Upcoming
06 Feb 2026	Target	Centrelink obligations resume; jobhunting has to begin in earnest	Upcoming
14 Feb 2026	IRL	Audition for 2nd choir	Upcoming
28 Feb 2026	IRL	[REDACTED]	Upcoming
01 Mar 2026	Target	Next newsletter	Upcoming

I may or may not be posting this a little too late for the automated February 1st newsletter. That’s okay. We’ll get ‘em next time; I want to fit in these reports at the start and end, where possible, but I’ll most likely have to tweak this a few times (should this appear at the beginning of the automated emails, but be a month out of date? Should it appear at the end, buried under a bunch of other posts? Both? Should it even be the same every time?)

After a loosey-goosey Christmas and January, I’ve started back at my internship this week. The general idea is I’ll be doing about 16 hours / 2 full work days a week, treating it like a part-time job and using it as an opportunity to build on my education as a screenwriter (and beyond). I probably won’t be reporting on the contents of that work here, for reasons that ought to be immediately obvious.

Starting in February, I’ll be joining one or two local choirs that will rehearse Monday and Tuesday nights, respectively.

I’m keeping the livestreaming schedule pretty loosey-goosey while all the IRL stuff starts coming into view — it’d be a little goofy to set out a bunch of commitments only to find I can’t reasonably hold to them.

That said, a few loose plans are taking shape for the month: I find running co-working seshes keeps me productive and focussed for most types of desk work, especially admin and writing (anything that involves sound, like music or editing, gets dicey). I’ve also got a shortlist of games that I’m keen to do playthroughs of live for chat, including Hollow Knight and Hades II. And some tentative plans for co-streams with a couple of streaming pals and their communities of comparable size.

I’m also looking into the possibilities (and problems) associated with multistreaming to TikTok and maybe Streamplace, as well as “merging” my two brands (my Twitch identity and my Government Name, which up til now have been kept very separate). If I follow through on both of those things, it might open up the additional possibility of mirroring my livestreams on my homepage. In the meantime, I’m not sharing the link here, yet. Feel free to ask me one-on-one; otherwise it’s IYKYK.

MEDIA

On the main page, click the Reviews & Impressions category to get the latest on my media consumption.

Currently reading/watching/playing:

• 📚 Sourcery, a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett
• 📺🎮 Dispatch (2025, AdHoc Games)
• 🎮 Star Wars: The Old Republic (2012, Bioware / Broadsword)

MISC

The most difficult parts of the next few months are going to be making time for exercise, and getting regular sleep. I say this because those are always the most difficult parts when I’m throwing myself into a new schedule, and boy are the next few months going to have a bunch of new things in the schedule.

Personal goals:

• Go swimming at least once per week (stretch goal: 2/week)
• Co-working sessions at least one morning per week (stretch goal: 2/week)

ONWARD

What’s next?

• February kicks off a bunch of ongoing commitments (choirs, internship, jobhunting)
• Slate work: Experimenting with interactive media, finishing and polishing uni scripts
• Building and refining templates for use in these newsletters
• Doing my best to maintain regular posting, community engagement, and personal health practisesOnward to February!

It’s 2026. So, what am I getting up to this year?

As I write this I’m housesitting. The two 4-month-old kittens want to stick their noses into everything, especially if it’s people-food they can’t have full of onion and chilli and dairy and salt, the spout of the kettle while it’s boiling, my laptop keyboard while I’m trying to write an email, or the lid of the toilet while I’m trying to scoop their many, many daily poops into it. I’m watching the weather forecasts like a hawk, because a 30-degree day means multiple sessions of watering different parts of the garden — especially the wisteria, whose leaves have been observed to shrivel up entirely in harsh sunlight.

To put this year in context, I’ve been spending the last couple of years moving toward a career change out of video editing and back into storytelling.

After COVID and the advent of AI, the last company I worked for downsized its video team. My options were to become an all-in-one editor (taking up things like graphics and animation) or pivot back to why I learned editing in the first place: to facilitate my broader filmmaking and, more importantly, writing. I took a two-year course to spend some time easing back into it post-burnout, rebuilding my ability and confidence to write at least a few episodes' worth of material per year.

That course is now over, leaving me at a turning point: either sink without the external structure, or learn to swim for real.

I have a few projects. Most of them are leftovers from the screenwriting course — writing assignments that had to hit a page count, without regard for whether that was the end of the story (it never was; it’s always 25-30 pages. For my brand of outlining, pacing, and scaffolding scenes that get cut later, 40+ pages are needed). Once the first drafts are finished, some of these will become portfolio pieces and others will become part of an ongoing development slate. Short films to produce, pitch decks to create.

I’ve heard it said many times that, as a screenwriter or producer, you should have a slate of about six projects at any given time, in varying states of development. I definitely have a longer list than that, but three-to-six is a good number for prioritising. The rest is officially ‘backlog’, to be reinstated only when items from the current slate are either formally deprecated, or done.

I’m not sure whether to include this stuff on the slate: the website, the portfolio, my spreadsheet systems as their own set of tasks. It seems trivially obvious that I’ll never run out of things to do.

The meta-task right now is to set up a bunch of spreadsheets I’ll need to actually use, whose functions include (but aren’t limited to) tracking progress on my slate (see above), managing my networks, and (perhaps, eventually) tracking how I spend my time and money. I think I’m ready to start reporting on and being accountable for my progress — not always to you, the reader, but at least to myself. And if I’m going to learn some basic coding (e.g. for interactive storytelling), then I might as well practise and expand on the coding knowledge I already have, which is specifically in the context of spreadsheets.