Feel strangely calm today, after weeks (months?) of debilitating stress. It’s sort of like, hell, if the simmering volcano is going to finally erupt and destroy everyone and everything I care about, there’s actually very little I can do about it. It’s not a particularly nice calm, but I’ll take it.

I cannot write a witty enough comment to match the astronomical level of joy this video gave me.

A World War III Illustrated roundtable

WW3 Illustrated is an underground anthology of leftist and radical comics that’s been published since 1979, emerging from the ass-end of 70s counterculture and DIYing through the neoliberal imperium with issue 54 just released.

The Apprentice movie is good! By far the most disturbing thing is how Roy Cohn emerges a sympathetic character. Yes, to draw comparison with Trump, his Frankenstein’s Monster, but I was not prepared to feel sorry for Roy fucking Cohn. Intrigued as to how those unaware of his history felt.

The art, artists and artifice of Charles Burns

I recently read and was blown away by Burn’s latest book, Final Cut, so this extensive overview of his 40 year career was very welcome (even if I might quibble with some conclusions…).

TCJ review of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

I plan to treat myself to a copy of this once I scrape the pennies together.

Made a couple more shelf brackets. Nice to see the shape is settling into something aesthetically pleasing. Earliest one is at the back in the photos. #woodworking

Erik Davis profiles Joanna Newsom in 2006

I got this copy of Arthur magazine for Alan Moore’s writing and remember the Newsome piece, though I didn’t know who Davis was back then. Nice to revisit it, and a good excuse to listen to Ys again. Amazing album.

David Lynch’s Elusive Language

I was struck by how Henry Fonda’s performance in Fail Safe (1964) reminded me of David Lynch as Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks, and in searching around found this lovely piece about his struggles with words which I strongly related to. I love words, but they are hard.

New Cure album is good. Like, really good.

Watched two films today, the new Woman of the Hour from Anna Kendrick and the 1664 cold war thriller Fail Safe. Both cast the past as a very flawed place while making me think that if things have improved that progress is desperately fragile. Both highly recommended.

Second attempt at a shelf bracket. Less shaving with the rasp this time and flattened the shape to suit the shelf better. Probably need a couple more goes before I’m totally happy and can mass produce. #woodworking

Made my first shelf bracket. Needs refining but really happy with the results. #woodworking

Thinking about Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking. www.tate.org.uk/art/artwo…

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.