The internet notebook of Pete Ashton
The oldest forest in the world
In 2018 Charles Van Straeten’s palaeobotany team discovered the fossilised root system of a 385-million-year-old forest in New York State. Noah Kalina was sent to photograph him on site and has posted the subsequent article to his newsletter. Fascinating stuff…
My sister is emigrating (returning?) to the UK from New Zealand next month. Among the insane logistics they’ve decided to bring their cat. The very concept, not to mention the process, of shipping a pet from the other side of the planet is fascinating to me. I will have questions once they’re here.
I see the UK branch of the culture war has shifted to concern for the fate of family farms. it’s worth remembering that family farms are a direct consequence (if not the actual aim) of the Enclosure of the Commons and are basically hereditary feudalism. So yeah, fuck family farms.
My awakening re family farms came from the 2021 Farmarama podcast series Landed, where the heir of a Highlands farm with an interest in progressive regenerative farming looks into the history of his property, who it was taken from and what was lost in the process.
Why is London’s phone signal so bad?
A really thorough and accessible explainer of how your phone connects to the internet and what factors, physical and societal, might bollix that up. London is a perfect storm but this applies everywhere.
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The Amazon Tax is when you buy a thing on the internet for, say, £20 and it turns out to be shite, but you need the thing so you buy the decent version for, say, £40, so it’s actually cost you £60. You don’t have to shop at Amazon for this to happen. You just have to be a tired human in 2024.
I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed Baldur Bjarnason’s recent spate of posts and commend his writing to you. Here he points to lessons from how queer counterculture navigated persecution and pushbacks in anticipation of a reactionary right-wing resurgence.
A look back, with context and interviews, at the groundbreaking 1964 film The Colony which gave members of Birmingham’s Caribbean community a voice on national television for the first time.
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Carole Cadwalladr often comes over like someone who has gazed into the terrifying, uncaring void and needs you to know how bad it is, and that’s mostly because she has. But this is remarkably measured - a calm, constructive fury.
A humorous illustration by Darren Cullen. (via)
A nice long read about the furthest point from land in the Pacific, and the people obsessed with it. (via)
Tickets for Caption 2025 are on sale.. Back in the 1990s early 2000s Caption was the annual gathering for self published comics and zine weirdos in the UK and a very important part of my life. I’m intrigued by this revival and have bought my ticket. See you there?
Birmingham’s composting project, Compost Connections, revamped their website and I copyedited the manifesto so much they’ve credited it to me, which is nice. Sidebar / scroll down to Changing Culture through Compost. #permaculture #composting
Saw Megalopolis, which I enjoyed mostly for the audacity of the thing. I was really struck by how operatic it was. Coppola’s uncle was a big name in opera and you can see it in the overblown, heightened, theatrical showiness. That early scene on the gantries, and the chorus nature of the crowds.
It’s not a great film, probably not even a good film, and the politics are nonsensical, but I think it holds something interesting together. I suspect I’ll be thinking about it a lot over the years.
You know how when photography freed painting from the need to be representational and it all went a bit batshit crazy? I’m looking at the catalogue for Breakdown Press, an indie comics publisher, and wondering if they same thing will happen / is happening to book publishing.
For those who read their phone in bed to keep the brain demons quiet - there’s an iPhone accessibility function called Reduce White Point (similar for Android) which makes it properly dark.
Accessibility settings are a goldmine (which is a bit of an indictment…)
The summary here would be “you don’t hate self-driving cars, you hate capitalism, and self-driving cars.”
Not Just Bikes give a thorough breakdown of what is to come, what the historical precedents are and why it’s not inevitable, in a 1 hour video essay.
Coupla rabbits for ya.
High-pope of the weird Erik Davis wonders where his rejection of bigotry and xenophobia comes from and, as a child of the 70s, identifies the Mos Eisly cantina scene, zooming in on the historical and cultural meanings attached to such places.
The fact that this is a “cantina” and not a saloon also reflects the logic of Westerns, and the fact that Mexico — which, like Spain, is known for its cantinas — functions as the Western’s (and Hollywood’s) own margin of otherness. It’s not-home turf. […] Within the genre of the Western, whose classic form involves the imposition of (white) code on ruffians, pagans, and wilderness, saloons often represent spaces of slippage, moral ambiguity, negotiated comradery, social conflict, and the mingling of classes and, at least in later Westerns, skin colors. They are the most important “third place” of the Western, which means that, for all their violence and hedonistic excess, they are the space of the demos — the anarchic agora of primitive democracy.
A truth too often missed by today’s institutionally managed multiculturalism is that diversity often thrives at the edge of settled law, outside of homogeneous cultures, and proximate to trade and, therefore, to wayward desire and enmity. It is no accident that today’s nationalists and nativists not only oppose immigration but also generally oppose global trade, that Trump wants massive tariffs. Despite the extraordinary flaws of the post-war neoliberal order, whose neocolonialist karma is now coming due, global trade demands a degree of multicultural pluralism which, for all its own hypocrisies and terrible limitations, is, let’s face it, still better than world war.
Whatever the horrors of the economies that drive them, such enclaves are hotbeds of culture.
I recently watched and thoroughly enjoyed Rachel Bloom’s new standup show Death, Let Me Do My Special and naturally went looking for interviews with her about it. This one on Rolling Stone is good and ends on the dissonance of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend being critically acclaimed while also the lowest-rated show on its network.
Is that dissonance difficult? Especially for projects that you’re extremely proud of?
My therapist has a term for it: status dysmorphia. On one hand, you’re like, “This show’s a big deal.” Our live shows are selling out. I have a Golden Globe. Have an Emmy. The movie offers should just be coming in. Oh, they’re not? But when I listen to [old songs], I’m like, “I can’t believe The CW let us do this.” I can’t believe a network that had Riverdale and superhero shows let us do a song called “Man Nap,” just about men taking a nap. It’s so silly.I’m already thinking of my next show after this. I want to go on tour with a brand new song-stand-up show. I want to do more music videos on YouTube and TikTok. I would love to get some money to make those music videos, but if nothing else, I’ll just fucking do it myself. It all goes back to making your own shit
Does it feel cyclical for you to get your start in showbiz on YouTube and now be thinking about a return to social media?
It’s always going to be me. Sometimes on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, even though we were a TV show, it felt like we were backstage hand-making tinfoil hats for the school play. A couple months ago, I did this musical Reefer Madness in L.A. For a couple of days, I played the role of Jesus. Kristen Bell was a producer and I saw her literally carrying rugs around backstage, mailing out the rehearsal schedules. And I was like, “She’s making the tinfoil hats and she’s Kristen fucking Bell.” At the end of the day, it always comes back to, if you want to make something happen, you gotta get the tinfoil.
I do like how the listing for micro.blog on fedidb is for “microdotblog”, presumably because including the dot fucked up the database, but which has all manner of exciting connotations you would not usually associate with an online publishing platform.
Switched to a different slab of scaffolding plank to make the next shelf support which turned out to be a harder wood with more grain (from slower growth). Interesting! And pretty!
Spent a bit longer sanding it as the gashes from my shaping were much more obvious. #woodworking
Working on the shelf itself today. Always a delight how lovely the wood is underneath the rough cut. Hand-shaved the curve and routed the edge, then sanded to 400. Needs a bit more sanding with a finer grain, but getting there.
Next, stains!
How do you review one of the most batshit British newsstand comics? You review it like this. Far too many great lines to quote here.
I’m deep in the McKenna section of Erik Davis’s High Weirdness book and keep thinking how my main reference point to his work is a stupid pop song from 1992. I probably read this NME interview. I wonder what effect it had on me.
