We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things

A thoughtful meditation from Deb Chachra on what we actually need when we want stuff that minimises harm during its manufacture and eventual disposal.

And better doesn’t always mean something will last a long time. The plastic packaging in which we buy and store food might have a useful lifetime of only days or weeks, but in that time it may keep food fresher than paper, or contain leaks better than aluminum foil. Longevity isn’t the right answer for everything, and neither is thoughtless disposability.

What we really need is more ways to limit the harms of what we buy, own, and discard.

(via)

The Many Lives of Null Island

A deep-dive into some hardcore mapping arcana. “Null Island” is not an island. It’s a term for “the coordinates of 0º latitude and 0º longitude, a location in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa where the Prime Meridian meets the Equator, hundreds of miles from any real dry land.”

Null Island is not just a silly place to think about when cartographers are bored, it is a phenomenon that repeatedly and annoyingly asserts itself in the middle of day-to-day cartographic work, often when you least expect it. Sometimes you load a new dataset into your GIS program, but the coordinates aren’t parsed correctly and they turn into all zeroes: your data is on Null Island. Or sometimes if the map projection file for your data is wrong, you’ll find a tiny scaled-down copy of your coordinates floating around Null Island. Or even worse, maybe most of your data is showing up in the right place, but only a few of your records are missing coordinates; if you don’t think to check for it, you won’t even realize that some of your data points have “taken a trip to Null Island.”

Let me try to explain with a few examples.

(via)

Gamergate at 10

Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, aka Caitlin Dewey, is doing a bunch of posts about Gamergate, that moment when for many people the internet took a sudden turn into a dark and scary place and which arguably set the tone for the next decade of misogynistic culture-war shite. This post is an introduction for those of you lucky to not be that aware of what exactly Gamergate was, setting up what’s proven to be a fantastic series.

I hope you don’t remember Gamergate, or that you recall it dimly, like a bad book you read and largely forgot. The ugly, year-long spectacle, which kicked off 10 years ago today, disrupted the lives and careers of dozens of women and non-binary people — and forever changed culture and politics. Depending on whom you ask, and what your precise threshold for “credit” is, Gamergate can be credited with the rise of the alt-right, the prevalence of misogyny in online discourse, the mainstreaming of several harassment tactics and the normalization of abusive campaigns…

Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungi

Before I got Covid I was involved in an art/eco project regenerating a patch of toxic canalside land in Birmingham. I brought my nascent composting knowledge and took away loads more about soil remediation, before I had to retire.

This is a very similar situation where “Danielle Stevenson cleans up carbon-based pollutants and heavy metals from contaminated sites using fungi and plants.” Fungus can digest most-anything carbon based, which includes oil and plastics, while plants can extract metals and toxins from the soil for safe disposal (or even reclamation) elsewhere.

In nature, it’s actually plants that pull metals out of soil. And so there are fungi, they’re called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, that can help plants do that better. And so on Taylor Yard [the Los Angeles railyard] and other sites, I’ve worked with a combination of decomposer fungi, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, and plants that we previously found to be able to pull metals like lead and arsenic out of the soil into their aboveground parts. These plants can then be removed from the site without having to remove all of that contaminated soil.

Fascinating stuff.

(via)

The Doc Web

One of those “I’ve been thinking about this for a while and someone has articulated it well enough for me to just link to them” moments. What if we approached writing online less in terms of publishing finished pieces which quickly go out of date and more like Wikipedia pages, constantly updated and never finished by design?

And also, have you noticed people using Google Docs as a publishing platform? Partly genius, partly a crushing indictment on the state of Wordpress-style content management systems.

Anyway, Jay wrote stuff so I don’t have to.

The Hedgehog Olympics

We recently had hedgehogs in our garden, which caused me to join Hedgehog Street, which has a blog, on which they posted a load of videos of hedgehogs doing “olympics” which are frankly genius level.

Gary Panter’s ROZZ-TOX Manifesto

An artefact from the 1980s LA punk-art scene. When I found this I thought it would be a fun frippery to post here, but of course it’s very chewy and not a little complex, finding me both nodding and frowning. There’s some of that Wharholian “art is commerce” stuff, of course, which feels a little dated, maybe?

Item 10: In a capitalistic society such as the in which we live, aesthetics as an endeavor flows thorough a body which is built of free enterprise and various illnesses. In boom times art may be supported by wildcat speculation or my excess funds in form of grants from the state or patronship as a tax write-off. Currently we are suffering from a lean economy. By necessity we must infiltrate popular mediums. We are building a business-based art movement. This is not new. Admitting it is.

But there’s plenty here that feels timeless, or simply shows that despite our so-called digital revolution nothing has really changed.

Item 5: Close the bars! We require well lit media centers that serve soft drinks and milk. We require that top-40 radio stop it. And this for extant executive entertainers: We know when to laugh. Machines don’t, and it is irritation to hear them laugh at the wrong time. They laugh at nothing and nothing isn’t funny.

If you’re not aware, Panter is a good friend of Matt Groening, meaning this is the ur-text for The Simpsons.

(via)

Danny Sriskandarajah - the radical who left Oxfam to fight for democracy

A really interesting interview by Zoe Williams where I found myself agreeing with most of what he says, and that doesn’t happen often with people at his level. Well worth a read, but I’m posting this mostly for this bit:

He carefully enunciates the fungal theory of change – that when “mushrooms” (consequential movements or individuals) spring up overnight, it’s because of a vast, invisible, underground network. “Those manifestations of the angry mob or the system-change activist will only happen if we nurture civic life in all of its forms,” he says. “Start with whatever you’re passionate about. It could be as simple as the kids’ football club. Get involved, volunteer, connect with your community – do stuff.”

I like this a lot. There’s a huge psychological problem with feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues facing our survival as a species and our inability to do anything about it, and anything which bridges that is always welcome. It’s essentially a spin on “think global, act local” focussed on community building as means to consciousness raising.

Williams keeps pushing back on this, which I like as it’s a bit counter-intuitive (especially if you have a platform on an international news website where you have some change of enacting change).

I still struggle to process how getting involved with kids’ football could have arrested the country’s slide into British exceptionalism and casual discursive racism, but Sriskandarajah’s point is that you have to be able to imagine yourself as part of a world in which things improve. You can’t do that on your own: you need models of change, either looking outside to the world or backwards to the past, but you also need an “associational life” – to be part of a collective that does some positive, tangible thing.

“Models of change” can come from anywhere.

Eight Years Ago at the RNC

Molly Crabapple has posted drawings from her reporting on Trump’s coronation by the Republican Party in 2016, and they’re quite something. My immediate point of reference is Ralph Steadman’s grotesqueries, and I mean that as the best compliment.

It’s eight years later, and we’re in the midst of another coronation. Again, the country lurches inevitably towards a Trump presidency, the path greased by a craven Democratic Party that’s openly contemptuous of its base, and by a narcissistic, unelectable candidate who believes the office is theirs by divine right. It’s all stupider, uglier, and pettier. Such is the nature of reboots. It’s all about to get a lot more nasty, too, as this time, Trump has a competent machine behind him.

Wyrd Britain

A new-to-me but 10 year old blog to be added to my list of things that use the word “weird” as a container, label or framework. To be investigated.

Welcome to Wyrd Britain, a place of stories of a stranger Britain

(via)

The coming storm, part 2

Charlie Stross’s state-of-the-world overview, linked to for the following bit.

c. We’re surrounded by the signs of pervasive low-level brain damage on every side. Having come through an acute pandemic wave of COVID19 in 2020, governments everywhere now seem to be in denial that the pandemic is ongoing—and we have vaccines that diminish the acute impact of the virus from life-threatening to merely “a bad cold”. But it’s not a bad cold! It causes widespread inflammation throughout the lining of the blood vessels, including the brain’s circulatory system. Cognitive damage is apparent and is one of the symptoms of long COVID: it causes symptoms ranging from stroke and Parkinsonism to dyscalcula and even dementia. If you’ve noticed poor, erratic, or angry driving in the past couple of years, road manners are one of the more evident signs of what’s going on. Cars are a proxy for bodies in public space and elderly drivers are notoriously bad; we’re now seeing a lot of aggressive, oblivious, and inexplicably bad driving behaviour routinely, and an uptick in accident rates. There may be other less obvious side-effects: I suspect the angry political discourse is to some extent inflamed by the brain inflammation of the folks who think COVID19 is over.

My bout of Covid last month seems to have made my Long-Covid worse, particularly cognitively. Hopefully it will pass but the last few weeks have been notably harder than I was getting used to.

Mary H.K. Choi - What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained

Another writer in their 40s discovers they have autism. I’m tempted to collect all of these into a book that tells the same story over and over but with significant and important differences. (If you’ll pardon the niche reference, not unlike a series of Becher photos of industrial buildings.)

Choi’s experience is harder to romanticise than some accounts as her traits were making her marriage hell and she went through a hard process of dealing with imposter syndrome, possibly aggravated by her experience as a child of immigrants, being different and having to mask her way through awkward social situations.

And even if I was officially autistic, was I autistic enough for it to matter? And what did that mean? I’d grappled with impostor syndrome at various points in my life, and the nightmare scenario I kept returning to was that I might tell a colleague or acquaintance that I was autistic only to have them reveal that they had a severely autistic child. I found this prospect mortifying beyond redemption. I was convinced they would rightfully feel that my comparative claim to autism was so marginal as to be deceptive. Did I just, in some grotesque display of privilege, pay hundreds of dollars for a doctor’s note that would excuse me from the social mores by which humans in a functioning society were expected to abide? I refused to be an apex asshole of weaponized therapyspeak, a Coastal Elite victim of the self-care-industrial complex. And yet … And yet.

(via)

Paul B. Rainey’s Why Don’t You Love Me? optioned by Jennifer Lawrence and A24

For most of you the news that some book is being made into a film is not that interesting, but I’ve known Paul since we were part of the UK small press comics scene in the 1990s and I couldn’t be more happy for him.

Why Don’t You Love Me? follows a miserable couple, Claire and Mark, struggling through their marriage while “feeling like something is not quite right in their reality,” teases A24. The graphic novel has been described as a “pitch-black comedy about marriage, alcoholism, depression and mourning lost opportunities,” with surprising twists along the way.

I just found this stream of Paul going through all the work he made before Why Don’t You Love Me?, most of which I have copies of in my boxes of zines, and then introducing the book to the world.

Earthrise

A lovely short documentary from 2018 about the photographs of Earth taken from the lunar orbit of Apollo 18 and the effect that view had on the three astronauts, all of whom are interviewed at length. I really enjoyed this. It’s been posted in full on Youtube and there’s one of those interactive website things.

(via)

The Rise and Fall of Earthrise

This is so relevant to my interests it’s almost a parody. A nice chunky but very readable essay by Erik Davis, the foremost expert on the weird counter-culture (his book High Weirdness comes highly recommended) talking about the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, the Earthrise photo taken on that mission, its impact on the environmental movement and appearance on the cover of the Whole Earth catalogue, the contradiction of a product of the military-industrial complex being adopted by granola-chewing hippies, Gerry O’Neill’s advocacy of space colonisation, Buckminster Fuller’s concept of Spaceship Earth, Martin Heidegger’s distress over the existence photos of Earth from space, the fungible meaning embedded in photos of Earth from space, the variations of the Overview Effect felt by astronauts, and how all this led to, or fed into, the techno-utopian ideologies that have defined the tenor of the last 50 years of extractive capitalism.

Phew!

If you’re curious about what makes me tick, this is as good a primer as any.

Of course there were multiple messages in [the Whole Earth catalog], which makes for a certain irony today. First there’s the juxtaposition of the cover — a sublime artifact of advanced military-industrial technology — and the hippie arcana within, like macrame manuals, DIY tipi specs, and buckskin garment guides. This is the kind of contradiction that is, as the Apple products say, designed in California. Indeed, Anders himself grew up in San Diego.

The deeper irony is that the faith in “tools” the catalog represents, however beautiful and true within a humanist frame, becomes decidedly less charming when it simply greases the infinite instrumentalism of Extractive Capitalism. This egregore or asura has grown so ravenous and mighty that even the two ancient rock stars of the Apollo image — this planet, this moon — can be seen from a certain perspective as nothing more reservoirs of resources to fuel its own galactic self-realization.

Could you forgive your childhood bully? Katy Wix confronts a painful memory

I read Wix’s “autobiography in 20 cakes” Delicacy last year and loved it - her writing is so good with a lightness that both flags and obscures the crushing sadness of growing up and then being an adult who went through growing up. This could have been a standard Guardian Lifestlye piece but her writing… omg…

How bad was it, really? I didn’t wear a sleeveless top in public until I was 32, because of what she said about my shoulders, but it could have been worse: I could have been 35. I only spent a year in speech therapy to get rid of my lisp. And I’ve only mentioned her about once a month in therapy, definitely not every week. How do you calculate the impact another person has had on you? Well, it’s either ruined my life, or it’s fine.

The Universe with Dr. Katie Mack and John Green

I’m not a big fan of podcasts for anything other than falling asleep to but I have been thoroughly enjoying this long-form explainer of how the Universe was formed and how we know what we know about it. The format is the key - John Green is utterly bemused by the most basic cosmological facts so Katie Mack has to explain everything as if talking to a child. And then every so often John summarises what she’s said in his own words, showing that he gets it. This double explainer is perfect and I now fully understand stuff like dark matter. Highly recommended.

(via)

On Not Being Online

Warren Ellis commenting on Jay Springett talking about the internet feeling flat and what we can do about that. I’ve been thinking about this a bit too (I’m sure anyone who’s been actively online for a couple of decades has these thoughts) and if I might add a tuppence, I was really struck when going through my 1990s zines at the diversity of style and content compared with the homogeneity of whatever we might define as online culture, and I think this comes from a comparative paucity of interconnectivity and shared language across all zines. You’d see tropes evolve in pockets but nothing on the scale of memes like the Wojak characters. The internet is like water - it flows along the fastest route and wants to become an ocean, which is maybe antithetical to sustaining weird edgelands culture. And this is becoming a blog post rather than a link comment, so off you go, clickity click. I’ll cogitate further and see if I have the energy for a longer post.

What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

I’m a big fan of journalists explaining Britain to non-British readers because it gets me right out of our parochial bubbles of assumptions and prejudices and gives a new perspective on the absurd stuff I’ve gotten used to.

This is a loooong read from the New Yorker, so set aside some time, but it’s a good one. I particularly like how it’s written by someone who grew up in London as the son of a City banker, so they have access to the mindset of people like George Osborne and speak their language.

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum, as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

🔓

See also Politico’s more lighthearted American’s guide to the 2024 UK election.

In defense of an old pixel

A lovely look at the history of pixel fonts, that is to say letters made from a grid of dots, like cross-stitch, how they were made and the seemingly infinitive variety available from such a constrained pallet.

(via)