Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Status:

Feeling a bit woozy and on the down-low today. Not incapacitated by any stretch and in a fairly good mood, but definitely not able to reach out of any comfort zones. I did get a fair few tabs closed and written up below, which might seem counter-intuitive, but those feel nicely contained with clear parameters. Anything broader and uncertain, not so much.

The two things I thought I might start pondering today are the redesign of the front of the shed where the rabbit run is and the retooling of this blog into something that can iterate in a new direction. The former has been planned for a couple of years and really needs to happen this summer before the rains come. I have a good plan for how it will work but haven’t figured out how to actually build it, especially as I won’t be doing any building so need to instruct others. That’s going to need a fully rested day to get my head around.

The latter is relatively simple but just needs a switch in workflow to test out some things. I want to see if I can batch up a chunkier and more themed post over a few days rather than just through the afternoon and while that’s not much it just feels a little daunting today. I might start by doing a very overdue Aerobic Digest since there’s plenty in the bucket and the first link below has gotten my stinky juices flowing.

Reading:

• Cas Marketos: What is compost, and why does it work? — A couple of short excerpts from her new book, the first of which is the simplest, almost poetic explanation of composting I think I’ve read. “There is, however, an important distinction between “compost” and the plain fact of decomposition: the presence of the composter. The composter is tasked with stewarding the conditions of the compost pile." (I often think if I hadn’t gotten ill I could have achieved with the Aerobic Digest what Cas has, but I know that’s probably just wishful thinking.)
• The rise of intellectual clout — I didn’t enjoy reading this, at least not as first, as I felt incredibly seen and not in a good way. What they’re describing here, using terms like “intellectual maximalism”, is essentially how I’ve functioned for 40-ish years and very much how I approach my online activities, and yet the framing here is the next big self-improvement, social capital trend. I know the capitalist shite-verse is inevitably going to overlap with whatever you’re doing in your goblin cave before moving on to the next shiny thing, but it’s quite disconcerting all the same. What is interesting is the framing of this emergence as a reaction against educational institutions that are failing us, something that definitely happened to me in my teens and twenties and caused me to find my own way. So maybe, beneath the polished surface for the algorithm, there’s something actually going on here.
• Why some DVLA digital services don’t work at night — My doctors surgery will only take online queries during office hours. This is basically a webform which reception then forward to the right person but for some reason they can’t or don’t want to manage a backlog that might have built up overnight. It’s quite frustrating (I’m very much an evening admin person) and when I’m not annoyed by it I’m fascinated as to why this might be. For example, I can submit a repeat prescription request through the NHS app at any time but I can’t ask them for a sick note renewal at 8pm. This explainer as to why the DVLA website does a similar thing reminded me of it, though I doubt the surgery runs on COBOL. via
• The rise of “surveillance chic” — Apparently people are taking footage from their surveillance devices at home or work and using them to post to their streams. In itself not hugely interesting (though only half of this post is publicly available) but there is a long history of this sort of thing, going back at least 20 or 30 years. I particularly remember an artist who staged dances in front of CCTV cameras and then requested the footage (which you can do if you’re in it) to edit into a performance. The fun quirk was the surveillance companies had to manually censor everyone else for privacy reasons so she was dancing with these black-blobs headed people. There’s also a lot of work be done around the static camera recording what happens in front of it — dashcam footage is part of this — and how neutral or biased that can be. So yeah, good to see people are still interrogating this stuff.
  • (If you can remember what that dance artwork was please let me know!)

Watching:

• Noah Kalina reviews the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair ‌(23:15) — Low hanging fruit but still fascinating to see how bad it was.

Listening:

• Origin Story: Starmer revisited – Where did it all go wrong? (1h27) — Two years ago, just before the election, Dunt and Lynsey recorded their hopes and fears for Starmer’s reign. This is part autopsy (plenty of blame for putting McSweeny in charge of delivery) but also a mea culpa on their parts, which is always refreshing.

Looking:

• Top 30 from half a million World Cup photos — The Guardian picture editor choses his favourite pics and explains why they work for him. There’s a journalistic bias to his eye, of course, but they’re still great picks. Even if you’re not bothered by stadium sports there’s something about the mix of action, colour and lighting conditions, plus the sheer volume of cameras around the stadia giving full coverage but also the opportunity for creative play, that produces objectively great images.

Neologisming:

• Otrovert — ‌a neologism coined by New York psychiatrist Rami Kaminski for a proposed personality type described in popular media as involving a persistent sense of being an outsider in group settings, even when the person is socially included, and a preference for selective, one-to-one connections over group affiliation. This rings disturbingly true for me — my comfort zone is quiet and alone but I can pull out (and do enjoy being) charming fun Pete when needed. Intro vs Extro never felt right so I welcome this new ‘vert and am adding his book to my long-list. via

Status:

Saved my batteries up today so I could go to the allotment to top up the compost. Went across the park on my own on the scooter and did the decanting at my own pace. Had a nice short chat with a lady I hadn’t seen for a while and then came home. All managed without any help from Fi.

Reading:

• Still Expanding Those Minds — My spiritual weird uncle Erik Davis on recovering a podcast he made a decade-plus ago, but the best bit is an account of visiting one of those insane looking Mormon churches on the rare occasions they open them up to the general public. Erik addresses the building’s aesthetics ‌(“a baroque futuristic monument that rockets toward the heavens like two frosted X-wing fighters racing neck and neck”) and gets into the weird mix of the cosmic and the anodyne that epitomises the Mormon practice. It’s easy to laugh at it but that mix of the extremely ordinary and the extremely out-there is, well, it explains Battlestar Galactica.
• The Andy Burnham I’ve met over the past 20 years gives me hope for British politics — John Harris, on the eve of the anointment of his chosen one. I joke, and I’m not expecting much once he has to eat his bowls of shit, but it will be interesting to see someone who hasn’t come up in the hothouse of Westminster take control of this island.

The Sunday Papers:

Somewhere there’s a think piece about why so many digest-style newsletters come out on a Sunday. Have they replaced the Sunday newspaper ritual of grazing in bed slightly hungover with coffee? Anyway, here’s my main three.

• Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends #777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines — Really like Caitlin’s perspective on internet culture. This issue has a fun bit about people queueing in New York which she finds horrifying but which to this Brit seems perfectly normal.
• Sentiers No.412: The looting of science fiction ⊗ We’ve been here before — Nice chunky issue before Patrick’s summer break. Will be holding this in reserve.
• Orbital Operations: Misc — I’ve long had a complicated relationship with Warren Ellis’s (not the musician) output in that I’m not a fan of his work but I do share his interest in a lot of subjects, plus I like how he documents and shares that interest. But his comics, books and community curation leaves me at best cold and at worst annoyed. Which is fine, plenty of people like what he does good for them and him, I guess. Recently he’s been retooling his Sunday newsletter to be less pointy and more curatorial but this issue, ironically due to a lack of time, is all pointing and it’s full of the good meat.

Watching:

• How my off-grid drinking water system works ‌(6:28)

Status:

Slept for a very long time last night, maybe 13 hours. Didn’t even need my pillow-friendly headphones to send me off. I was feeling pretty antsy last night and on reflection I did do something every day for four days, so even though those were limited, well managed and not harmful in themselves they did add up. Today I’m feeling much clearer but the lesson has been learned, keeping it on the down-low.

Reading:

• Energy and the Matter Problem — This has been sitting in my tabs for a while as I thought it would require a clear head to process, but it turns out to be a very accessible read which I commend to you all. Not a surprise as Deb Chachra is a great writer. Here she looks at how abundant energy, correctly applied, could solve “the matter problem”, as in how we deal with the atoms we extract, use and dispose of as an earth-bound society. The opening example of how aluminium went from a near-impossible to produce luxury metal to literally disposable is particularly enlightening. Bascially, if you throw enough energy at it, properly recycling plastic waste at an atomic level becomes viable. Via Sentiers who provides a good summary of the idea and some context.
• I’m queer, not gay. It matters. — I remain interested in this distinction between what we might call weird gays and normie gays.
• Find the Fox – new Cartography — It’s often said that an artist shouldn’t explain their work and leave it to the viewer/reader to interpret, but I have to say I love it when an artist spends time writing about how something came about. Especially when they’re as good as Ed Pinsent.
• Astronauts returning from six-month missions describe a persistent ‘observer’ sensation — the feeling of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame, weeks after they’re back on the ground — Many physiological and psychological reasons are given related to them having been in space but I think the dramatic context shift plays a big part. The way we’ve decided to run our modern lives is really odd and in many ways quite inhuman when you come to it objectively. I wonder if people doing similar ground-based things like long-distance walking or solo yachting around the world show the same effects.

Watching:

• Timber framed barn part 39: Horizontal bifold door ‌(56:46) — When Kris' videos come out I always look forward to seeing how he dealt with recent weather conditions.
• The “bluetooth connected!” voice actors ‌(5:16) — Quite surreal as they slip in and out of their device voices.
• so Pixar made a movie about climate change ‌(1:05:29) — I have a soft spot for young nerds talking passionately and intelligently about ephemeral pop culture and was pleased to stumble upon Angela Collier who mixes up theoretical physics and science communication with her love of the movies. Here she does a deep dive into the recent Pixar movie Hoppers, which it turns out is bad for reasons that are quite interesting actually. Yes, there are strong echos of Lindsay Ellis and more directly Jenny Nicholson, and yes this probably didn’t need to be an hour long, but this is Not A Problem.

Calculating:

• Rooftop and Plug-in Solar Calculator — Been poking at this for our east-west facing terrace. The interesting discovery is regardless of whether you go for a simple no-battery 2-panel plug—in system or full roof with battery storage the payback timescale (after which the energy is basically free) is about the same, ±8 years. Really shows how interest-free loans are the answer here for people who don’t have £5-10k to hand.

Status:

My monthly-ish occupational therapy for the chronic fatigue was today. The general consensus is I’m doing pretty well at pacing and keeping to my baseline while pottering around the house. That baseline is pretty unproductive though and while productivity is a toxic concept, I do need to feel like I’m contributing something.

So the next task is to try to do more things, see if and how they harm me, regroup and then try them differently. The goals we set are to go to a cafe/bar once a week on my own and to develop the writing I’m doing here into something more packaged and “useful” rather than whatever happens to come out of my fingers that day.

The former is to get me back into the community while the latter is to get to a position where someone might pay me to work from home. Both are very much long term goals which I don’t expect to fully achieve before the year is out, but they also feel doable.

Reading:

• Ghost Town, At The Club and Britain’s summer of discontent — A history of The Specials recording their 1981 number one single and its roots in the broader ska and reggae scenes. I would have been nine and vividly remember this song being everywhere and the riots being on the telly news. The coverage was all about “youths” and it was a while before I realised a “youth” was not a term for a violent rioter and that my older cousins were “youths”.
  • ‌Dammers had noticed it while on the road with The Specials. They’d arrive in each town to find shuttered shops and barren high streets. In an interview with the NME he recalled the particularly bleak sights of Glasgow where “little old ladies were on the street selling household goods.” He put pen to paper, jotting down a few lines which might capture those scenes. “This town…” it began.
• ‘People are picking the dumbest fights’: the tortured history of America’s culture wars — Interesting new book about the US religious right targeting contemporary art in the late 80s (Mapplethorpe, Piss Christ) because it was the last bastion of queer culture in a censorious mediascape, and how that informed our current clusterfuck of nonsense. This bit is a good lesson:
  • ‌ Asked why the liberal establishment failed to counter this rising tide, Butler identifies two fatal flaws that continue to plague the Democratic party today. First, they underestimated their opponents. Just as many initially dismissed Donald Trump’s escalator descent as a clown show, the Yale-educated liberal elite of the 1980s looked at figures like Wildmon and Helms and dismissed them as “yokels”. Wildmon, for his part, relished being misunderstood and underestimated.
  • The second, and perhaps more devastating error, was the liberal fetishisation of compromise. Butler says: “It is this feeling that, if you’re attacking me, if I give you a little bit of what you want, you’ll calm down and we can work this out like reasonable people. It doesn’t work and we saw that under Obama, who would often compromise even before the fight started.
• Turning front gardens into driveways is adding to night‑time heat — This is a big issue in Birmingham, the most car-centric of the big cities. It’s also a problem in new developments which seem to need to accommodate wide roads, pavements and driveways at the expense of lawns.
• Football, England and the triumph of modernity — Ian Dunt saves me the bother of writing about football. (90% agree with this.)
• The toxic legacy of Starmerite philosemitism — This reminded me of how, should we ever visit Fi’s extended family in Ireland, I should definitely not talk about Irish politics because while I have opinions about Ireland and GB’s relationship with it, they are comparatively on the level of “oh look, the dog thinks it’s people” and should rightly be ignored. Thankfully my opinions about Ireland have no impact on anything at all because I am not Prime Minister.

Watching:

• Social Singing with Moselele ‌(9:50) — My good friends Daz and Emma talk about the ukulele group they set up 16 years ago where being able to play the ukulele is optional. (Fi was an early regular and they played our wedding.)

Music:

• Ex-Easter Island Head is a name I’ve seen around for ages, mostly in Supersonic Festival communiques and the like, but somehow had never listened to until they cropped up on a particularly stacked episode of Night Tracks. For some reason I’d assumed they were heavy sludge metal (which is fine) but they’re a really interesting kind of percussion-y minimalist drone sort of thing. I like! I like a lot!

Status:

Had a couple of friends over last night to watch the football, which was nice but also the first time, in my 54 years, I’ve ever had someone over to watch the football, so it was a little odd. I wasn’t sure if we should be catching up or attentively watching the little men run around. Match was fun, and I confess to some schadenfreude at the eejits in their crusades cosplay at the end looking all sad. Fuck those guys. Learn your history.

Today I took some portrait photos for my bro-in-law who needs to update his CV. We had a highly amusing discussion about what he should wear and what kind of background, me knowing nothing and him knowing only a little more than nothing about what might go down well. In the end we went for what he wears to meetings. The pics came out really nicely, which was a relief, and might even be good enough, although we’re probably going to have another go now he’s got a baseline. In the old days we’d have spent a while going back and forth but I could only manage 20 minutes. Still, I managed 20 minutes!

Two social interactions within 24 hours. Definitely having this evening to myself…

Reading:

• The Dacre dynasty: how Britain’s rightwing press was radicalised — A dare-I-say essential read for anyone wondering why so many newspapers have gone batshit crazy over the last decade or so. If I had a pantheon on villains Paul Dacre would be high up there.
• What on earth is “QuickTime”? — An article about accumulated debt in a software that also has a nice history of the Mac’s QuickTime player. I got a key for QuickTime Pro around 2003 from a friend who worked in The Movies which I treasured until it was finally discontinued as it was the quickest way to turn a movie into images (and then I discovered ffmpeg).
• John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage — Nice interview focussing on the releases of Hairspray and Desperate Living.
• Clown Logic: The Crow nears 40 — leaving aside the clunky headline (‘The Crow at 37, or 33 if you’re talking about the collection’) this is a reassessment of James O’Barr’s goth classic which, despite it’s legacy, is really not a very good comic. But it resonated. Boy did it resonate. And this is a nice look at why that was.

Installing:

• WhatCable — Given that a UBS-C cable can be any number of things from a dumb charging cable to a high-speed data conduit, it always seems strange that macOS doesn’t have a utility to tell you what you’ve plugged in. This attempts to do that. Still a bit more limited than a dedicated device but better than nothing!

Status:

A light pottering day today. Tidied the kitchen a bit. Thought about how much the football commentary annoyed me last night. Didn’t do much else.

OK, I’ll bite. In short, commentary for big sporting events that take over mainstream channels should contextualise and explain to the viewer what it going on and not assume that viewer has been following the minutiae of said sport in the months and years prior this big event. Football commentators do not do this. Commentators for other sports and similar big niche events have their flaws but at least at Wimbledon, Crufts, the Olympics, they make a fucking effort to address a broad audience that is genuinely curious about what’s going on. Don’t moan about what in your clearly superior opinion the players should be doing using insider terminology and jargon. Tell me why they did what they did so I can make my own judgement. Also, Ally McCoist is perfectly capable of talking in a clear and enunciated way when it suits him, he just chooses to mumble incoherently 90% of the time like he’s in the pub with his mates.

I’ve very much enjoyed the matches but frankly I’ll be relieved when all this is over and I can leave planet football for another couple of years.

Reading:

• The radical resurgence of UK fanzines, 50 years after punk — The Guardian has noticed it so it must be real. Not going to read too much into this survey as I’m sure everyone involved is cringing at aspects of it. My instinct is these zines are less about sustaining networks, something which has been superseded by “the socials”, and more about creating islands of sanity that interface with other network. Zines today seem quite expensive to produce and distribute, which I find interesting as historically their cheapness and accessibility was their primary appeal. So if it’s not cost or reach, what is their purpose now? I don’t pretend to know the answer, btw.
• Heat deaths are a public health crisis rooted in housing inequality — The poor tend to live in smaller accommodation which they’re unable to modify in urban heat islands that amplify the harm. Modification for changes in climate is a luxury unavailable to them. (I’m very aware that my efforts this year have been enabled by my being time rich.) Of course killing off unproductive poor people is not a problem for capitalism.
  • Heatwaves will scorch British economy — Maybe losses of £25bn a year will get their attention. (I’ve definitely noticed that during heatwaves everyone else’s productivity drops to my CFS level, which makes me feel much less stressed but probably isn’t great for the economy.)
  • Thx to Jules for those two links.
• Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts — The Guardian, like many outlets, has been quite susceptible to AI boosterism so this is a welcome correction.
• I hate the way we talk online — One of the most bemusing things about learning stuff is you assume that because you now know it so does everyone else. I learned about context collapse nearly 20 years ago and yet social media corporations seem to have built their entire models around making it worse.
• What would a land value tax actually do? — Also summarised in this Bsky thread. Apparently there is a serious proposal to replace stamp duty and council tax in the UK with a tax on the value of the land you own. It would be much more equitable but if suddenly introduced would produce a lot of winners and losers. Interesting stuff, though I have no idea how likely it is to happen.
• Time might not exist – and we’re starting to understand why — Confess I got a bit lost in the weeds of this and will come back to it when my head is clearer, but the basic idea is nice and chewy.
• The oceans are full of heat, and it’s coming ashore — What happens when the heat sinks are full of heat?
• The state of RSS feed readers — A 2026 survey which looks to me like very little has changed, which is probably a good thing?
• Climate we had in 20th Century ‘has now gone’ - Met Office — Ah well. Good job we’re developing new climate appropriate infrastructure then right? Right?

Watching:

• Werwulf trailer ‌(2:14) — New Robert Eggers film incoming. Looks grimy and a good fit for the Weird cannon. Fun fact: it’s co-written by Sjón, a childhood friend of Björk and who performed with her and the Sugarcubes as Johnny Triumph.
• Martin Lewis on knowing if an advert on social media is real or fake ‌(2:29)
  • Via this post which highlights Lewis’s term “the legitimate web” which I obviously like a lot.

Happy autumn! Oh, it’s still July? My mistake.

Status:

Psychotherapy day today so I’m taking it easy in the garden, grazing the internet and letting my thoughts settle. We talked a bit about my choice paralysis which can go from being a joke (when presented with a menu I will ask the waiting staff what they have too much of and I’ll have that so it’s not wasted) to being, well, paralysing.

I’ve realised that through my life I’ve rarely had to make a big choice between two equal options. Most of the situations I’ve found myself in just imposed themselves upon me, or just required a yes/no answer, so I’ve never had much practice. Having to choose where I don’t know what the outcome might be is just horrifying. When I do find myself in that situation I’ll usually just wait until one of them expires and then do the other one, or do neither. I have no idea how common this is but it does make me wary of libertarians who crow about wanting absolute freedom. No thanks!

Weather’s quite pleasant today. Technically the heatwave conditions are still here but there’s a strong breeze coming from the north east (usually it’s from the south west) which really takes the edge off.

Reading:

• Inside the Luddite festival harnessing Gen Z’s rage against big tech 🪜 — Fascinating to see this in Wired of all places, especially as it’s a very sympathetic and non-judgemental piece. Reminds me a lot of local art-friends Hipkiss and Graney’s work, especially their Woodland Games festival.
• British grammar invades the American World Cup 🪜 — Apparently the way we speak about soccerball has impacted how USAmericans do words. As someone British who has consumed a vast amount of American media over the decades and who has never attained a formal understanding of grammar (I taught myself to write using a mostly vibe-based system of trying different things until it feels right, and then getting educated people to proof-read if necessary) I was utterly bemused by this article. It’s nice that people have things they care about, but really?
• “If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.” — Summarising a thread about people’s favourite and hated filetypes, because we all have them. I don’t come across HEIC that often because I immediately disabled all that shit on my devices, but Fi had to get a new phone and I noticed she unknowingly sent me a couple the other day. My least favourite is probably “anything that should be a Jpeg”. More positively, while TXT is functionally my favourite I do have a soft spot for PSB, the Photoshop format for documents over 2GB. It literally stands for PhotoShop Big and I love that.
• Can humans hibernate their way to Mars? — Beyond the tedious headline (stop trying to colonise to Mars, it’s not going to work) this is some seriously interesting research into how some animals hibernate and whether than can be applied to humans for medical purposes.
• US-style ‘whites-only’ towns spread to Wales — A report in the Telegraph (which reminds me of when it used to be a proper newspaper) on the connections between white nationalist compounds in the US and UK. The Woodlander Initiative in Wales is kinda fascinating for the overlaps it has with more progressive, less fascist movements and ideologies, and really shows how easy it can be to slip from one to the other, as anyone who’s followed crafting and woodland YouTube channels can attest to. But what really struck me was that whites-only towns already exist in the UK countryside — they just tend to be populated by wealthy posh people in places like the Cotswolds. Which is doubtless why the Telegraph isn’t glowing in their coverage. Scruffy lower-class oiks, fascist or not, don’t deserve to be in the countryside unless they’re working for the lord of the manor, what? (Also interesting that the US version is called Back To The Land, echoing the 60s hippy movement , but that’s a whole other kettle.)
• Frances Ryan: Here’s what a truly progressive PIP system could look like — PIP is back in the news, which is never a good sign. I don’t expect any government that worries about the hard-right press to do the right thing but you never know, their might listen to Ryan and maybe even save money!
• Hating AI in 2026 — “I’ve struggled to write something that would persuade my colleagues and friends to ditch AI and affirm their avowed beliefs about climate change, the trustworthiness of megacorporations, and our right to live and work with dignity. I accept that I’m not up to that task. So I wrote this instead for anyone who someday wonders what the hell is wrong with us."

Watching:

• Trailer for Digger ‌(2:39) — the new Alejandro Iñárritu film. Looks suitably batshit.
• LIVE Brooks Falls - Katmai National Park, Alaska 2026 — Watching this livestream of brown bears feeding on migrating salmon(?) and marvelling at how evolution got fish to jump up a waterfall and bears to stand at the top haphazardly catching them. (The bear I’m currently watching seems particularly incompetent.)

Clicking:

• Clipart Studio — I’m not sure the art of magazine collage translates to a click-and-drag screen-based medium but then I thought the same about jigsaws until quite recently. This uses Internet Archive mags and images and the gallery has some nice stuff in it.

Earworm:

• Bauhaus: All we ever wanted was everything

Status:

Most of the stuff my PE teachers at secondary school said went right through me as it was irrelevant nonsense, but one thing has stuck with me. I remember one of them talking about the importance of keeping up sports once we left school and didn’t have him forcing us to do it. He told us about meeting star pupils years later and them smoking and being fat (this was the 80s, and he was a PE teacher) having let themselves go.

I don’t really care about that — fuck 80s school sports and all who taught them^* — but what’s struck me is I don’t think my other teachers gave a talk like this. Nobody explicitly warned us about the dangers of stopping learning academic stuff.

Looking back, the stuff I learned at school was of course important (and while I didn’t do at all well at formal exams I did still learn a lot), but it really just formed a foundation layer for the enormous amount I’ve learned since. Maybe this is normal and unremarkable and everyone keeps learning through their lives, whether it’s through career development or hobbies. I clearly didn’t need it, but maybe I’m like those people who go to the gym for fun. What about the people who just stopped learning once they didn’t have to anymore? I don’t know where I’m going with this.

^* Like many things in education, they’re probably much better now.

Reading:

• RIP Sam Neill — One of the really good ones. It’s rare to find someone whose work you really enjoy and who then turns out to be a really great person in real life.
• Flickr’s optimistic committing — Or, isn’t it neat how Flickr’s uploader shows you what’s going on? This is one of the features from when Flickr was run by the original team and it really shows. There’s so much annoying crap on there now that Yahoo later implemented and which for some reason SmugMug haven’t rolled back. Flickr was very much of its era but produced so much best practice stuff that today’s web companies could dearly learn from.
• Astronomers detect ‘raspberry sugar’ on dust cloud in Milky Way — Today I learned sugars came from space.
• Jessamyn’s guide for removing unwanted AI from your junk — As part of her role helping library patrons with their tech problems. This is apparently a frequent request.
• Using the Xteink X4, a minimalist e-reader — I remain intrigued by this stripped down, pocket sized ebook reader. Not enough to drop ~£50 on it though.
• Sentiers No.411 — Still processing the links from yesterday’s edition but I did enjoy reading the newsletter itself.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf ‌(17:11)

Status:

Over the last week the rabbits' biological systems have been instructing a significant amount of their fur to leave the building and as such we have had some buns with rather tufty butts. Because they don’t run through spiky undergrowth it’s up to us to groom them, something they really do not appreciate. It’s a fairly regular occurrence, particularly when the temperature changes and new coats are needed, but today was quite the haul, as seen in the photo above.

The main adventure today was my bro-in-law’s 70th birthday picnic which, unless I’m forgetting something, was the largest social event I’d been to in a good couple of years. A bit of anxiety beforehand, of course, as I’d be meeting new people but it turned out to be lovely. Everyone was sensible and quiet and no-one minded me sitting alone on the periphery. I even managed to take a group photo, organising people like I used to do at weddings, although I needed a good lie down afterwards.

The weather helped. After days of paralysing heat it was just warm enough to be pleasant with a nice breeze. Though I do see that after a brief reprieve we’re not going much below 29 degrees next week. Might leave the window coverings on for a bit longer.

As such I haven’t done my usual level reading today, and that which I have read I haven’t had the capacity to write about. Enjoy.

Reading:

• Britain’s biggest community solar farm forced to shut over grid overload fears
• John Harris: Farage is just one strand in the tangle of rightwing politicians and crypto investors — The scariest thing about Farage is that he’s probably not that important in the grand scale of things.
• My confidence in my understanding of the scientific theory
• Describing the early Internet was surprisingly easy
• Phil’s Weeknotes
• Matt’s newsletter

Status:

Before the heatwave I ordered a cheap solar powered extractor fan. Today, as the heatwave enters its final stages, the fan arrived. (No problem with the delay - it’s hot out there!) But there’ll be another one along in a few weeks I’m sure, so it’s not wasted.

As is often the case I misread the measurements and thought I was getting as 12" fan but of course it’s 12cm, which is fine but quite limited in the amount of air it pushes through. It’s not going to work as a people-cooling fan in the dome, but it should fit nicely in the shed where it can pull out the warm air and make it nicer for the rabbits. Looking forward to fitting that once the heatwave fully passes.

While it only generates 12v it’s also the first modern solar panel I’ve gotten to play around with, which is quite exciting in anticipation of the plug-in revolution to come. I’ll doubtless be trying to wire it to all manner of low-voltage gizmos over the summer. Interesting how it seems to need sunshine on the entire surface in order to work. A couple of fingers of shade and it shuts down completely rather than just lowering the output. I now need to know why that is.

Today’s links start with three Stirchley-specific things, so feel free to skip if you’re not local to me. I’ve often been torn between the local and the global in my blogging. Both are important to me and I’ve never really figured out how to merge them. I remember the term “glocal” being banded around and frankly that can fuck off.

One of my back-burner ideas is for a Created in Birmingham-style^* blog for grassroots progressive, activist and cooperative activities in the city, building on the networks I’ve developed around composting and coops. I reckon there’s an audience and a need, and maybe even a bit of funding. Something to consider if/when my CFS subsides.

^* A CiB-style blog, in my parlance, points at all the things going on in short posts, giving a daily or weekly snapshot of a scene or community. These days it would have to deal with the walled garden of Instagram, but that’s for another day.

Locally Campaigning:

• Help us save the Warehouse — A very good and necessary plan to widen a railway viaduct in Digbeth is threatening the Birmingham Friends of the Earth building on Alison St which has been flagged to be demolished so land can be temporarily used for a construction worksite. In most other locations in Digbeth this wouldn’t be a huge problem as it’s mostly home to temporary and transient businesses and projects awaiting the inevitable redevelopment apocalypse. But FotE (who are otherwise in favour of the transport plans) have spent the last five decades developing that location into the hub of progressive, ecological action for the city. If you’ve ever used the building or the attached garden (Roo and I built our first compost bay structure there which led to refining the design and repeating it across the city) please contribute to the consultation and hopefully they’ll change their plans and spare it.

• A local church has plans to take over an old council office building on our high street, next to the primary school, and turn part of it into a community centre. This would be fine, except they’re one of those evangelical churches that doesn’t like gay people and thinks women are secondary to men. Which is fine, you can believe whatever you like, but I’m not comfortable with a community space that presents as a neutral good being run by extremists like this. They’re running a consultation really pushing the community bit, which has got my goat. (I have no problem at all with churches, mosques, temples, whatever and think they can provide valuable spaces and services in communities, especially at the moment. Faith is great, bigotry is unacceptable.)

• McDonalds are looking to build a drive-through in Stirchley. I’m actually not too exercised about this. Are McDonalds an evil megacorp with toxic business practices? Sure. Is a drive-through a terrible idea on an already congested road? Of course. Would I prefer they didn’t build here? Definitely! Have I used them when in a strange town with social anxiety and knowing exactly what I’ll get with the minimum of interaction is just what I need? Yes. But I know people who are very angry about this so here’s some advice. Don’t fill in the “consultation” that’s going around, especially if you object. It will have no impact on the council’s decision to give planning permission and will just allow them to tailor their application around your objections. Wait until that’s submitted to the council and then leave comments that actual decision makers will read.

  • Here’s a much more positive plan for the land, devised by local people, that just needs capitalism to go away.

Reading:

• Un-Doing Philosophy — Apparently AI chatbots are popular amongst academic philosophers. Not custom machine learning models that interrogate specific data sets, but your boilerplate ChatGPT scholastic parrot junk. Which is kinda worrying, no? Lily Hu thinks so and outlines why in this very entertaining and accessible essay which has applications in all disciplines, I think. [via]
  • “The dominant philosophical style today is stylelessness: a mode of writing that attempts at effacing the fact that a work has a creator at all. But while the fantasy that underlies stylelessness might have appeared fifty years ago as a mostly harmless expression of the philosophical aspiration to objectivity, it appears rather more ominous today. A technology which seems to speak from everywhere and nowhere on any issue, instantly, is now here.”
  • I tend to think, if you’re doing some tedious busywork from which you will learn nothing then yeah, automate that shit. But if the work is training, something which will make you better and stronger and wiser, then why the fuck would you offboard it to a machine? It’s like a marathon runner using a motorbike in their training. Use it or lose it people.
• The 13 biggest myths about heatwaves – and how to bust them — Useful back-pocket facts.
• Stewart Lee: Move over, Nigel – it’s time for the Bin Supremacy — The only people worth listening to about Binface are comedians and satirists. No-one else is qualified.

Watching:

• What is LaTeX? ‌(20:43) — Something I’ve often wondered as I’ve seen it mentioned about the place over the last few decades but never had the need to investigate further. I still don’t, but I love the fundamental idea behind it, allowing scientists to write formulae etc without having to worry about how it looks on the screen so they can focus on the actual work. “Formatting is not writing” is one of the most profound things I’ve heard in a long time and is why I love writing in Markdown. I don’t have to think about how it looks. That comes later.
  • via Unsung who zeroes in on how giving the user very limited control is way better than the semblance of full control. This is why WYSIWYG web editors are a nightmare. THEY LIE!
• Torbjörn Åhman makes a burnisher ‌(19:55)

Listening:

• What On Earth? With Count Binface ‌(28m) — A 2021 half hour of semi-serious nonsense from Radio 4 which ends with advice from Martin Bell who sort of predicts the current moment.

LOLing:

• Fiona is watching the US traitors at the moment. I can’t deal with that sort of programme so she’s got headphone on, but every so often I look up and see Alan Cumming dressed in the most ridiculous outfit and kinda wish I could join in.

The plants in the garden are really suffering right now.

Status:

I have found the perfect way to spend less time on my phone.

I needed to employ my secondary swimming shorts today as the main ones needed a wash. The elastic on these is not what is was and while they’re fine in a push I can’t have anything heavy in my pockets. So if I carry my phone with me, as I’m wont to do, every step reveals a fraction more arse until I’m borderline indecent.

Within the home this isn’t necessarily a problem but I don’t want to inflict this upon any neighbours in their gardens. So my phone stays in its dock while I find myself wondering what to do while I give the rabbits their run and just lean into looking at the trees and letting my mind drift.

The only thing I miss is the camera. Might be time to dig out one of the old compacts.

Archiving:

• Assembly Birmingham: from precarity of modern living to the power of righteous fury — Back in 2018 my chum Antonio curated a conference of smaller arts orgs in Birmingham and I was employed to report on it for the Artists Network. It’s no longer on their new website (because who needs history!) but Ant found it on Archive.org and I was pleased to see my writing stands up quite well. I wonder how many of the young people mentioned are still trying to make a living from their art.

Reading:

• Taking back control of rents: The impact of rent regulation on affordability, public spending and landlord profits — A policy document on imposing rent controls at a government level. I’ve just read the executive summary (and the bit on the Guardian’s politics blog) but it all seems highly sensible stuff. The difference between paying rent, mortgage payments and having paid off the mortgage is probably one of the big divides in the country and having been in all three positions at some point the unfairness feels untenable. ‌"For mortgaged landlords, a 20% reduction in rent reduces mean pre-tax profit margins from 70% to 64% – which means they would still be 4.5 times bigger than the mean pre-tax profit margin for UK businesses." How is this legal for something as essential as housing? Grrr.
• How to get ahead in journalism — Ian Dunt’s guide for young folks thinking of a career as a journo, written as a riposte to the old folks who told him it was a dying trade and he shouldn’t bother. “People have been proclaiming the death of journalism my entire career, but it’s still here. It’s still possible to have a career in it. It’s still possible to make money in it. Will you be rich? No. But you will work in the most exciting job in the world."
• ‘See the whole world in lichens,’ the marvels that grow anywhere — A lovely piece about the tiny probably-plants that grow everywhere and the scientists who study them. I once joined a moss and lichen guided walk around Birmingham with magnifying glasses and it was marvellous, finding these little forests in the bricks.

Watching:

• Primitive Technology | Firing tiles and building the roof on the mud mortar/fired brick hut ‌(16:11)
• Welcome to Auralnauts ‌(2:50) — News of their demise was wrong, actually. Looking forward to the new stuff!

Listening:

• Origin Story: Luddites ‌(1h44) — A solid deep dive into the actual history of the General Ludd, such as it’s possible to discern, and how the meaning of the word was twisted into an insult before being reclaimed in recent years. I disagree with some of Dunt and Lynskey’s conclusions at the end, but that’s one of the reasons I listen to them (never limit your inputs to people you always agree with).

Music:

• Feeling Lost by Echo Juliet — My friend has released some music and I like it!

You and me both, Wally.

Status:

Taking it easy in the heat today. Had a brief visit from my sister this morning and a long-overdue visit from one of my Loaf colleagues though we mostly talked about other things. It was all nice.

House continues to be 4-5 degrees cooler than outside, which is a win. Last night was a bit warm though — still haven’t got a good draft going between the bedrooms yet. (The idea of opening the loft hatch so it worked like a chimney had to be quickly abandoned on Tuesday when it became an oven and started heating the landing. Probably needs a temperature controlled extractor fan up there.)

Hogwatching:

• Hedgehog Cam 3—9 July 2026 — We’ve moved the feeding station to a slightly more secluded area so they hang about more and we’re already seeing some fascinating behaviour. Look for timestamp links to a couple of face-to-face clashes over the water bowl.

Reading:

• Beat legend, ‘boy lover’: how should we reckon with Allen Ginsberg’s complex legacy? — I’d forgotten Ginsberg was a supporter of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, one of those groups that makes even the most transgressive freedom-loving freak pause and back away. I have a memory of NAMBLA cropping up in some of the zines back in the day, usually in the cataloguing of far-out shit, though it seems even Ivan Stang didn’t include it in High Weirdness by Mail, which is saying something given some of the evil nutjobs in there. It’s basically pedophilia advocacy, and would have rightly faded into history, except for Ginsberg, one of the greatest writers and countercultural figures of his time. Kids today with their “problematic faves” don’t know how easy they have it.
  • While checking that last sentence I discovered that the Milkshake Duck was 10 years old last month.
• Flock and Ring are champions of the privatized surveillance state — Someone on our street chat was encouraging the rest of us to get a CCTV doorbell after a spate of Amazon packages were snatched. I’m not sure that’s the right solution.
• How the heck does GPS work? — One of those things I mostly knew (triangulation of satellite signals, right?) but didn’t completely understand, until now.
• Summer of Ludd schedule — This finished a few days ago in New York but I was curious to see what compromised a “week of free, public, and participatory events to get people off big tech, into public space, and re-enchanting each other."
• I trust in TextEdit — The Mac’s basic text editor hasn’t changed in aeons so you always know what you’re going to get when you load it. All software should be like this. I’ve tried using Apple Notes a few times over the years and each time it’s like a completely different app, and will likely change again. No software should be like this.
• UK has ‘no future’ if it fails to act on ecosystem collapse threatening national security — A report by intelligence services painting ‌a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation was blocked by Downing Street for reasons not given but I’m guessing because a) it’s fucking terrifying and b) would require global cooperation. But if they did publish the whole thing would the public take any notice? It’s not like this hasn’t been known for years already. ‌“The government can summon billions of pounds for new military hardware when the defence sector calls for it. We need an equally decisive mobilisation of investment to restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air. Without these essentials our country has no future.”
• I survived a cold plunge and all I got was everything I ever wanted 🪜
• Tremble before my gracious heat!

Looking:

• Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz Close to Home — an exhibition at the Baltic which I’m clearly not going to get to see but it’s good to see Murtha’s documentary photography getting a showing. I really enjoyed the documentary Tish which is still on iPlayer and well worth your time.

Watching:

• Dune Part 3 - trailer ‌(2:49) — No idea how this is going to land — the trailer looks all over the place but so is the source material at this point. I’m committed now. Bring it on.

Status:

Heatwave #3 is here and I’m delighted to say my idea of hanging silver reflective sheets over the front windows has had a tremendous effect, keeping the two rooms that usually heat up in the afternoon sun remarkably cool. Who knows, maybe I’ll start a trend on the street. That’d be nice.

(I would normally post a photo but, while I’m sure the information available to anyone who looks hard enough, we’d rather keep the front of the house private. Hit me up if I know you and would like to see it.)

So the day has mostly been spent in the newly cool room staying relatively cool, pottering on the internet and pondering the next development in my blogging. The shape I’ve iterated to over the last 9 months is very nice but the scheduling feels like it doesn’t work anymore, as seen yesterday. I’m wondering if a M/W/F notes and a more considered Sunday e-zine (for want of a better descriptor) might give me a bit more flexibility and allow for my slow reintegration with society to develop. I started this current format because I was basically stuck in bed or on the sofa all day. Now I’m on doctor’s orders to potter and move gently about the place, which doesn’t lend itself as much to daily blogging.

Anyway, as a great man once sung, songs about songwriting suck. Have some links.

Reading:

• Reasonable Concerns — Trans girls and women participating in women’s sports, which was recently prohibited in the USA, is one of those areas where even the most liberal of people might pause and have “reasonable concerns”. The problem, as Parker Molloy neatly identifies here, is this is just where it starts. The gender purists know this is the easiest of wins from which they can build to a comprehensive erasure of anyone outside a harsher and harsher binary, something which harms all of us. “The people you called alarmists have been right about every step of this, and most of you have met the moment they were proven right with silence."
• An interview with Andy Baio — Andy’s Waxy.org sidebar linklog very likely inspired me to try the form back in the early 2000s and I credit him with helping me see the value in pointing at cool things, something I consider the duty of all citizens of the internet. Really interesting to learn how he started and how he scours the web.
  • I’ve just thought of a great punchline to a joke about Andy trying to post something to Instagram. “Linking Baio.” Badumtish.
• Every photo of the moon behind a rainbow will show the moon in exactly the same phase — Maths, innit.
  • What would a rainbow be like on Tatooine? ‌(2:45) — If it ever rains on Tatooine…
• A thread about hippos that goes places — Nearly impossible to neuter and they bleed acid. And that’s just for starters.
• Low-cost loans for solar panels could save households hundreds on bills — Thinktank report so not necessarily going to happen, but it’s a good step. One of the problems with solar (and most renewables) is you need a significant up-front investment and a few years before it becomes ‘free’ energy. This would ease that.
  • Plug-in solar update — A gov.uk update from last month. No firm date yet but more retailers are on board so it’s looking good.
• The great carbon capture con — It seems the UK gov has put aside £21.7bn for this fantasy technology that will not make a jot of different. Maybe spend it on putting solar panels on every south facing roof instead.

Listening:

• Doomscroll: Hito Steyerl — Joshua Citarella talks with the creator of ‌How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, a film which captivated my brain a decade ago, and author of Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War which I confess I haven’t managed to finish but hope to one day. I was wary this was going to be full of art/theory speak, and it is, but she comes over as a lovely, open and funny person who’s very willing to say “I don’t know” and then start figuring out an answer. As often with Citarella’s chats I find myself wondering what it would be like to have lived a life where you’re able to converse at this level, but I’m sure they’re both idiots when it comes to talking about compost or underground comics.

Watching:

• Folding Ideas: Belle and the meaning of place ‌(10:13)
• Practical Engineering: The flaw that flooded New Orleans ‌(24:33) — Grady has a new book coming out which he talks about at the end.

Music:

• Was skimming through the tracks I’ve faved over the last 25 years of using iTunes and came across Nevermind Tribute, an unassumingly titled album of Japanese cover versions of Nirvana tracks. It’s heavier than you’d imagine but has some very enjoyable moments. Not as good as the borderline problematically titled Yellow Loveless but few are.

Status:

When I sat down this evening and opened this document I was surprised to see I hadn’t got any links ready for today’s post. None whatsoever. I’d sorted out the reflective cover for the bay window, which hangs nicely now and is doing the job, and had my psychotherapy session, which was a bit more intense that usual but didn’t leave me wiped out. Then I watched some soccer (Egypt wuz robbed), placed a supermarket order and did a bit of tidying up in the kitchen. Nothing out of the ordinary but definitely no sitting on my laptop reading articles and making notes.

So, no links today. Plenty of tabs open with interesting articles ready to go but that’s not where my head is at right now.

Some recent posts I’m rather pleased with that might be worth a revisit would be:

• Notes and links from Friday 3 July
• Notes and links from Mon 29 June
• Notes and links from Mon 22 June

Fingers crossed I get my mojo back tomorrow, eh readers?

Status:

Mostly recovering and pottering today but did need to do some prep for the heatwave. I’d planned out how to hang the big silver shade over the front window with the minimum of effort (because effort is in scarce supply these days) and with Fiona’s help I got both screws into the brickwork with ease. Then we hung the sheet and I pulled it tight, only for it to tear where I’d put the eyelet in. Unfortunately, as it’s the skin of an indoor hydroponics tent, it’s not particularly tough material, so I’m going to have to try something else. I reckon I know what to do though. Will see if it works tomorrow.

Big Read:

TCJ interviews Evan Dorkin

If you know Evan Dorkin this is a lot of fun, tracing his career from the very early days (there’s the first Milk and Cheese sketch on a napkin!) to the imminent publication of ‌Nerd Inferno, the 650 page doorstop collection of his life’s work.

Should you bother clicking if you don’t know Evan Dorkin? Um, I dunno! If you think this is a work of genius then dive in.

There’s a bunch of things about the origin of the Eltingville strips that I didn’t know, leading to some cutting stuff about a comics industry made up of fans.

Terrible fans move into the industry. We get these people as professionals. […] The people that you’re not safe around in this industry, they came from fandom. From just being people who scream at interns at DC Comics, to acting like some of the ways Jim Shooter acted with older professionals and whatnot. To the way that people act on panels or in the offices. We are they and they are us. We all come from fandom. Almost nobody comes to this industry accidentally.

Dorkin is one of the more insightful of cartoonists with a strong moral compass about the culture and industry he’s found himself in, for better or worse.

Reading:

• Heatwaves: expert tips on redesigning UK homes to cope with hotter temperatures — A rather aesthetically bold experiment from Loughborough University putting massive shades on a semi-detached house, and some interesting facts about how insulation can help or hinder cooling.
• The Art of Air and Space: Interpretations of Flight — Great review of this show at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Was delighted to see a decent chunk on Robert Rauschenberg. Would love to be able to visit this - hopefully it’ll tour?
• Balls (practically) to the wall — Fascinating insight into how the 1961 IBM Selectric typewriter prevented you from pressing two keys at the same time (something that was still a problem on my Smith Corona in the late-80s.)
• sighs, updates Number Of Days Since Judge Dredd Was Right About Something board
• Referee Philosophy

Watching:

• The Onion’s America: Birth Of A Nation ‌(26:01) — Starts reliably funny then goes proper weird in a very good way.

Listening:

• Origin Story: Paranormal Investigations — Didn’t fancy anything too heavy and this was just right.

Status:

Woke up grumpy as fuck today and quickly realised I wasn’t going to be much use or fun to be around so went back to bed. Feeling a bit better this evening after a decent stretch of box breathing and a good nap.

In hindsight this week was a lot and my planning wasn’t sufficient. A lot in this case being “going to a quiet cafe for half an hour” and then a couple of days later “writing something long-ish for my blog” outside of my usual slow, paced pottering. I’m not beating myself up because it will take me a long time to get this right, if I get it right at all. I shall remain optimistic, even when my optimism might lead me astray.

Reading:

• It’s only an island if you look at it from the water — A lovely piece by Elizabeth Cantwell on Jaws as a story about men, America and love. “This is a story about Quint and Brody and Hooper. The man who distrusts authority, the man who is authority, and the man who wants authority. The man who owns the boat and the man who is wary of the boat and the man who drives the boat. The man with no fear, the man who has always feared, and the man who does not yet understand what fear is."
• Bomb the Arctic, dam the Mediterranean and build a second moon: five outlandish plans to remodel our climate — The Guardian has been giving a bit too much uncritical space to geoengineering of late so it’s nice to see this look at stupid ideas from the past to put the contemporary hubris into perspective. My personal fave is the German plan to drain the Med which crops up in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.
• Happy 25th birthday, BitTorrent 🪜 — Legal and moral qualms aside, the protocol itself is one of the wonders of our internet age. I remember figuring out how it worked back in the day and being so impressed.
• The universe, as it turns out, is mostly Kirby Krackle
• Molly Crabapple’s reflections on her book tour
• Phil Gyfford’s weeknotes

Listening:

• You’re wrong about: The JFK Assassination pt 2 — Gets a bit into the weeds with this very long conclusion, and I confess I dozed off a few times, but still nice to hear all the conspiracy theories debunked with some thoroughly random digressions.

Status:

Slept for a good 12 hours last night and into the afternoon, so I must have been wiped out. Reckon it was the writing what done it, on top of fallout from Wednesday. It’s a clear sign that while I might be managing the pacing and avoiding the booms and busts, my actual capacity has not changed too much over the last year. I still can’t do fuckall of note compared to my pre-CFS self. What I can do is squeeze out moments of clarity where I can be relatively normal, make the most of them, and then not crash too badly afterwards. Or something like that.

In heatwave news we have a date and a deadline to get the mirrored shades on the front of the house. Hope to have something up by Wednesday.

Big Read:

‌Paul Soulellis: What is queer typography?

This is a really interesting lecture transcript, or illustrated essay if you prefer, on the aesthetics of queer media through the last half century, coming out of the 70s, through the AIDS epidemic and into the digital era.

I’ve long held a maximalist definition of queer, one that goes beyond sex and gender into complimentary weirdo (queerdo?) spaces, so I was pleased to see this paragraph on the overlap with zines by “radical artists, punk musicians, poets, political activists, and other marginal communities and movements” which fits with my thinking. (My emphasis)

Looking back now, from more than 50 years in the future, I hesitate to identify these designs themselves as queer. These materials do not define a queer aesthetic, and it would be misguided for us to arrive at that conclusion. Many movements towards liberation used similar tactics, like feminism, racial justice, labor, and anti-war movements. But still, there is something queer going on here, I think, in the moves and the acts and the attitude—design decisions that were made out of necessity, outside of the dominant forces of the design industry and mainstream publishing. These were decisions that were made without access to sophisticated tools, or editorial design expertise. In a very broad sense, queerness can be located in the radical, outsider status of these publications and their designs. This is queerness as an underground, alternative way of creating networks of care. Queerness can be located here in the scrappy, ad hoc, and sometimes homemade designs that were directly related to the urgency of protest and activism and survival.

There’s also some good thoughts on legibility and visibility, given how a lot of this stuff is quite hard to read at times.

And so for decades, we’ve seen how the fight for queer visibility — the fight to be seen by the state, to become clearly read units — leads to status and success shaped not on our own terms, not on queer terms, but by heteropatriarchy: terms like marriage equality, inclusion in the military, and the ability to accumulate and reproduce wealth. Participation in these logics of success demands legibility. A clear reading and gridded organizing of bodies and identities leads to prediction; predictive models lead to policing, and modes of surveillance that accelerate and engage with every aspect of our lives.

I find myself torn on this sort of thing. On the one hand I’ve often sought invisibility and the desire to hide away from the normies, from dressing neutrally to finding safe spaces. But within media I demand clarity and legibility. I hate messy design that gets in the way of understanding. I read this essay using my browser’s reader mode so I didn’t have to deal with that pink background and tight linespacing. For me, illegibility is how the world keeps me from knowledge and therefore power. It also keeps me from connecting with others like me — I need my work to be a clear signal to penetrate the mainstream noise.

But if the political wind were to permanently blow towards authoritarianism I can definitely see how that legibility and visibility could be a problem. (This is the premise of the excellent Tip Toe, that maybe coming out of the closet was a mistake.) We’re going to need to learn, or re-learn, how to go under the radar while still staying in contact. In online terms it’s all bit Dark Forest Internet, sending quiet, coded messages that pass through or are ignored by the bad algorithms. (I know I’ve felt a lot of relief from realising Google no longer sends random search traffic my way.)

Anyway, plenty to ponder.

The lecture was given a few years ago and has been developed into a book, Survival by Sharing: Essays on Queer Typography which is published in October.

Reading:

• Why can’t Britain turn its green revolution into cheap energy? A visual analysis — Interesting powerpoint presentation, sorry, “interactive essay” from the Guardian on the pipeline from planning to generation for wind and solar farms.
• Tips for coping with heatwaves for neurodivergent people — Mostly applies to all people but a few interesting extras, particularly around not being aware of what your body needs.

Listening:

• The Dark Truth About Mount Rushmore — I knew a load of this but can’t remember where I saw or read about it, so this is a nice reminder of how something I grew up thinking was just a thing they had in the US is actually where some baaad shit that down.

Looking:

• Burning flags, busty blondes and bison skulls: 48 photographs that capture America at 250 — Something something 20th Century’s art form something American Century something.

Status:

Mostly in the garden today finishing the Big Read piece below, responding to a trenchant review of the book about the Weather Underground, the inspiration for that Leonardo DiCaprio movie you enjoyed recently. I think its length, and that I’ve been working on it for days, is a clear sign I need to get back to proper long-form writing on a dedicated blog. Hope you enjoy it. It could probably do with a couple more drafts and maybe I’ll come back to it once I’ve read the book it’s about, but these are supposed to be off-the-cuff notes, so here you go.

In other news I hung the shiny panel of hydroponic tent out of the front bedroom window and it kinda worked. Needs tweaking so it blocks more light, and I don’t have any way to secure it in the wind. Thankfully heatwaves days tend to be pretty still.

Big Read:

‌A Better World Is Not Possible — Did the Weather Underground have a point?

When I mentioned The Revolutionists on Sunday, the book I’m currently listening to about the men and women who did terrorism in the 1970s, I described them as “people who were best useful idiots […] and at worst evil fuckers” and after publishing felt a bit weird about it. As Emmett Rensin says in this review of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young:

It is […] easier to sell a sympathetic book about the Weather Underground if you reassure your readers every 30 or 40 pages that of course political violence is wrong.

I’m not sure if political violence is right or wrong. I tend not to like violence just on principle and if pushed I’d struggle to define when it’s political or not. Isn’t all violence political? Whether you’re shooting an enemy combatant or pushing to the front of a queue you’re using force to reorganise the world and your place in it. That’s basically political.

What does seem fair to me is pushing back against violence with violence. Non-violent resistance has its place but sometimes you need to reply in the language of your oppressors, even as it erodes your humanity. Popular culture has a long traditional of celebrating the armed freedom fighter, from Suffragettes to the French Resistance, the Rebel Alliance to the French 75. But when we get them on our front door it’s all “oh, no, not like that. Not here.” In far off lands we can clearly see the goodies and the baddies. When it’s at home the lines are less clear. What if we’re actually the baddies? What if we deserve to get shot?

One man’s terrorist, and all that…

Rensin spends a long paragraph listing the heinous actions of the US government that convinced the Weather Underground they needed to fight back with explosives, then throws in a role reversal:

To ask whether or not it was morally justified to respond to all of this by making a spectacle of bombing empty buildings, one simply has to imagine the Iraqi government, suddenly possessed of the military power to avenge itself on the United States, flattening your neighborhood, setting fire to your city, poisoning your drinking water, sending armed men to execute your aging parents in their home—they voted for Bush after all, didn’t they? Then imagine that somewhere in Baghdad, some disaffected teenagers setting off a protest bomb in an empty office park. How strenuous your objection? How tightly might you clutch your pearls before some invading soldier ripped them from your neck as a trophy before setting fire to your home?

The political violence that is done in our names, with our tax revenue, that keeps us safe and comfortable, is uncomfortable to reckon with. The agencies that we entrust to protect us can also be turned against us should we drift too far from the status quo. Think of the Battle of Orgreave or the crackdown on New Age travellers, or the proscription of Palestine Action and arrest of anyone showing support.

Palestine Action feel spiritually close to the Weather Underground. Their aim is to do damage to the supply chain of war through criminal acts that, unless I’ve missed something, have not involved injury to humans. They have crossed a line by breaking laws that they see as immoral and so the state has declared war. Are they in the right? I don’t know. But I feel uncomfortable condemning them. Much easier to say they’re just doing it wrong, that they crossed a line, that they let their passions get the better of them.

And that’s really Emmett Rensin’s point, I think. That we who are so sure we would fight back against the Nazis in 1930s Germany, we who cheer at One Battle After Another and nod along to Luthen Rael, when push comes to shove we are remarkably slow to come around to the grim necessities of action. Partly that’s because those who do act first tend to be the annoying fringe extremists who’ve been ranting for years, but I suspect there’s a niggle of a reality check, that maybe it’s not actually worth it, that sense that maybe you benefit from the baddies being in charge.

To close the essay Rennin gives three choices in the face of state violence:

1. To retreat into the psychic defense of unconscionable acceptance.
2. The total and radical acceptance of these facts, of the impossibility of salvation in this life, of the inevitable passage through the veil of tears with eyes wide open.
3. To try to blow up a police station. To run wild through the streets. To scream and not stop screaming. To do this knowing that you are very likely to lose, that you are certain to be mocked and feared, discredited and persecuted; to endure the relentless, reflexive, and stupid double standard of a cynical world, and die and be forgotten.

At some point over the last decade, once the reality of Brexit and Trump had slapped me around the face enough, it occurred to me that, if this all played out in the worst way, I might have to learn how to shoot a gun. I don’t want to shoot a gun. I will do everything I can not to shoot a gun. But I have to acknowledge that one day I might have to. I wonder if I’ll recognise the moment if/when it comes.

Reading:

• Book review: Heatwave — The Summer of 1976 – Britain at Boiling Point — On the 50th anniversary here’s an accounting of what it was actually like, not just the hazy childhood memories of climate-denying posh right-wing columnists. (The ebook is 99p on bookshop.org)
• Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat — A look at Google’s climate report on their energy usage. It’s through the roof, presumably due to all the inefficient AI they keep doing, which means they’re burning more fossil fuels because the grid hasn’t decarbonised fast enough. Here’s a thing — I have a memory that when Google needed more people to be on fast broadband internet they basically built it themselves. When they needed photos of every street they drove around and photographed them themselves. If they need all this energy why aren’t they building their own solar and wind farms? Oh yeah, they’re the bad guys now.
• The perpetual present-tense — Internet Princess, one of the really good young-folk-writing-about-culture people, takes the trend of handwringing about The Youth not being horny fuckbeasts like we olds remember being back in the day, shows it to be nonsense by finding similar examples from the dark ages, and looks closely at the rhetorical “urgent-tense” where people are “increasingly” doing a wrong thing which has “become normalised”. We think we’re so special, us living in the now, but those of the way back when were no different. (It made me think of those cuneiform tablets from the Bronze Age that when translated contain curiously modern woes.)
• Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on making The Invite — Big fan of Wilde’s directing and looking forward to this.
• Finder’s elite eliding — Text truncation of filenames in the MacOS Finder really is a masterclass in good computer interfaces.
• FIFA essentially forced American cities to run month-long experiments in public transit — Interesting piece by infrastructure guru Deb Chachra on Fifa’s requirement that all fans can get to stadiums without driving, something that is unthinkable in parts of the US, and how this can force a change in culture.

Would like to be reading:

• Dictionary of the Illegible — This sorely needs more than a paragraph of description as I really need to know more. Hopefully substantive reviews will emerge in time as “illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance” tickles a bunch of my interests. (If Fi’s also interested then we’ll probably buy a copy…)

Listening:

• In Our Time: Seashells — And so the first season without grumpy Marvin Baarg concludes. I think on balance Misha Glenny did a good job and I like his childlike enthusiasm. The topics under discussion started strong but the last few were a bit meh, to the point where I stopped listening. This one was pretty good, and tied into that piece about colours I posted the other day (namely structural colours that aren’t physically there but are produced by physically changing the reflected light frequencies), but I felt it could have gone deeper or weirder.

FriendFeed:

• Jez’s linkfarm
• Helga’s recommendations
• Martin’s one-line spoiler-free movie reviews

Status:

Big CFS crash came last night, finding me fitfully sleeping and then missing my meetup with the neighbour. I probably should have cancelled anyway but wasn’t really in a state to figure that out. Early warning was the fuzziness and brain fog yesterday evening. If I can’t think straight then that’s a clear sign I’m fatigued and will need to recover. Unfortunately I can’t think straight so acting on that required undoing a paradox. Still, I’m feeling better this afternoon. The fog has cleared, though I still have to be careful. Briefly chatted to a neighbour over the fence and I felt like I’d done five rounds.

It’s worth doing an autopsy on these ventures beyond my comfort zone. I probably could have done a bit more prep, resting more beforehand, but I think the biggest issue was the anxiety beforehand. This should fade with repeated exposure, so I should probably at least try to go out weekly when possible, then I can get a proper measure of the physical toll it takes. I’m also thinking that sitting on my own would be good to begin with. Talking is another cognitive load and combining the two meant I was much more drained. Baby steps.

Due to my exhaustion last night I found myself watching a fair amount of el fútbol where a couple of central African nations very nearly beat the colonisers but were thwarted at the last. Senegal in particular wuz well robbed and Belgium have nothing to be proud of. All fun and games but I realised listening to the commentary that African teams do not usually do this well on the international stage, presumably due to the after-effects of said colonisation, so it’s nice to see a couple of them pushing back. They and their fans are also a lot more fun to watch.

The next heatwave seems to be being a bit of a tease. Every time I check the 10 day forecast the hot temps are 8 or 9 days away, just hovering beyond the imminent, lulling us into a false sense of security. Once I take my eye off they’ll race to tomorrow and I won’t have anything ready.

Came across a nice Robert Anton Wilson quote I’d not seen before. Because the internet loves to propagate quotes without sources I can’t be sure where it’s from (or even if it’s actually by him) but it rings true for RAW and that’ll do for now.

Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.

A good starting point for radical empathy, especially for those we disagree with.

Advertising:

Fi has an exhibition of her work (last seen at the Luna group show) at Stirchley Library, inaugurating a piece of wall they’re dedicating to showing art. I helped get the signage ready and in doing so knocked up a mock magazine cover for a joke, and since the work is all based on women’s magazines we decided to turn it into a flyer. It’s wouldn’t claim it to be a professional piece of work — I just moved stuff around in Pages and adjusted the colours until it looked OK — but I’m pretty pleased with it.

Reading:

• Labour failed to prepare for power, admits Morgan McSweeney — Insanely softball interview with the one of the people whose twisted convictions have decimated the progressive cause and paved the road for a far-right revival.
• Trump is avoiding the World Cup because it’s packed with good things he doesn’t like — Interesting comparison with Putin’s behaviour when the World Cup was in Russia. It’s a curious thing that international sport bends towards the siblinghood of humankind (to update the term) but in order to happen it needs to be platformed by autocracy and untethered capitalism.
• Rebecca Solnit: What is the United States of America now? — Essentially a big list of the good and the bad. Reminds me of something Alan Moore wrote ages ago listing all the people and reasons he still loved America despite everything it did. As a weirdo who found solace in comic books and movies, and then the counterculture and internet, the USA has always lurked large, often more than these septic isles I call home. It is a terrible place. It is a glorious place. I wonder if it actually needs to be both…

Listening:

• Ze Frank: Get Uncomfortable — I’m a long-term fan and follower of Ze’s antics on the internet, to the point where we have his Invocation poster framed in our hallway. One of those internet people who really understands the medium but is also totally grounded. Was great to hear how True Facts started and evolved in this interview with the Internet’s fanboy Hank Green

Status:

Went out for a cuppa today with a friend, the first time I’ve done this under my own steam in at least two years, maybe longer. The rest of the day I’ve felt OK but definitely drained and unable to do things I’d like to crack on with. There’s a good Big Read in the pipe but it’ll have to wait until I’m able to do it justice. The thoughts are mostly there but I just can’t construct the sentences. Most frustrating but it’ll come in time.

We went to what used to be Wildcat, one of my homes-from-home in Stirchley, to the level that I had my own tankard behind the bar, until I got sick of tourists asking me how they could get a tankard and disturbing my peace. It always used to be quiet midweek during the day with locals sitting on their own reading books and the like. Liam decided to quit the business this year (and fair enough, hospitality is a nightmare business these days) and a neighbouring bar took over the venue, promising to keep the vibe. And I’m happy to say in the half-hour I was there that they’ve succeeded. I can definitely see myself going back there again.

My medium-term goal is to find somewhere I can go with my scooter and hang out for a while, slowly acclimatising to not-being-in-the-house without too much stimulation. I’d also like to get back into the community that I miss so much and during my time there I saw four people I know, either in the bar or passing the window. It felt good to be in their vicinity. So maybe Wildcat, sorry, The Cloak and Dagger, will be my new home from home.

This is all assuming this fuzzy head doesn’t develop into a horrible crash tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Reading:

• George Mombiot: When the right denies the true danger of heatwaves, ask yourself this: whose children’s lives is it willing to risk?
• ‘This is the dark art’: New book claims pattern of personal attacks by Murdoch media empire — He wrote the playbook for this kind of shit and society is so much the worse for it. One of the great villains of our age.

Watching:

• Hannah Peel interview ‌(12:46) — One of the presenters of Night Tracks, my go-to insomnia aid, and a fantastic musician in her own right.
• Honest Government Ad | Palantir ‌(3:30)

Looking:

• The wild photographic life of Ed van der Elsken — Not often you see a photographer decry black and white as a cheap effect, but it really is. ‌‘I often say that in colour photography you have to expose yourself, to show you can make good, significant photographs without trickery. I know this because I did the same thing myself 20 years ago, making gloomy, dark-skied, high-contrast prints, and because those techniques are used willy-nilly for cheap effect, I take a devilish pleasure in puncturing those balloons’

Status:

Psychotherapy session today and while it wasn’t too heavy it did pretty much dominate the rest of the day. Managed to get a bit of reading done this evening but otherwise I’m not sure exactly what happened outside that hour.

Reading:

• Iason Gabriel - the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI — I sighed upon seeing this and was ready to tear to pieces but it’s a surprisingly interesting and hype-free piece. Yes, Google have hired this guy for what we might call the philosophy-washing of their corporate tech, but the guy himself seems pretty on the level with a clear sense of what his team is being asked to develop an ethical framework for. There’s also a nice history of the pre-2000 era when this stuff was bubbling up and the lines in the sand were being drawn between those who thought conscious machines were coming and those who saw the next abuse of power. Must be interesting to be sitting in the middle of all that.
• You don’t have to swallow frogs — From last September, an analysis of a conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates which is interesting for it’s look at US politics but I think is highly instructive on the way the Labour Party in the UK has tried to deal with Reform. “I believe [Klein is] in the throes of a real struggle over how to proceed. But as of right now, he’s only serving the political movement and business interests that benefit from a morally compromised, morally compromising political left. His lack of compass in this moment means that he’s being played by a system that benefits from his confusion and his willingness to spread that confusion. “

Watching:

• Stewart Lee’s record shop crawl ‌(28:28) — This was a lot of fun. Lee goes on a bike ride around East London visiting the sort of record shops you feel mildly intimidated by. You can see him flip from imposter syndrome to hyperactive know-all nerd once he finds some weird jazz record he knows all about. Also, a surprising amount of Birmingham-specific landmarks in Hackney.
• Michael Sugrue on Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Post-structuralism ‌(46:12) — I hadn’t heard of Sugrue and his 1992 lectures which apparently were very popular during the early pandemic. I’ve never had a good grip on Foucault beyond the very basics and (some of) this has (sort of) helped a (very little) bit.
  • via Foucault Psychoanalyzed

Clicking:

• The AI Compass — I found this quiz to be much less annoying that I was expecting and the list of archetypes in the results was quite amusing. My result: “The Conscientious Objector (patron saint Holly Herndon). It doesn’t work well, it’s doing real harm, and you’ve opted out on principle. You’re not a technophobe — you just think this specific technology is overhyped and corrosive, and you’re tired of being told you just don’t understand it. You understand it fine. That’s the problem."

Status:

Rest day in preparation for what look to be a fairly busy week, at least for me. Tomorrow is psychotherapy, which has been a bit more tiring this time around for some reason. Wednesday I’m going OUT to a CAFE with a FRIEND, something which hasn’t happened for maybe two years? And then Thursday I’m meeting with a neighbour who also has chronic fatigue, which will be nice, but also, new person, so extra cognitive load. Getting my pacing strategies ready so Friday isn’t an emotional mess.

I’ve followed up on a couple of the heatwave ideas. I checked the vent in the attic roof and it’s substantial enough and should be doing the job, so we’ve left the hatch open for a few days to draw air in from below and it’s definitely cooler up there. Plan is to just leave it open a crack throughout the summer and see what happens, but I’m optimistic it’s going to make a massive difference.

While up in the attic I dug out the hydroponic tent, measured the windows it needs to cover, and it’s a good fit. I’ve cut out a couple of panels and put them to one side to fit some fixtures on another day. I reckon we should be able to stretch one across the main lounge window and suspend the other from the upstairs window without need for ladders.

Big Read:

The no-human future — What is Nick Land’s philosophy of accelerationism really?

Via Patrick Sentiers who provides a good summary of what can be a pretty dense essay at times. I definitely skimmed the middle bit on Kant, Deleuze et al but the top and tail are quite readable.

One of the things you quickly realise if you study western philosophy is that most of the great philosophers who dealt with the human condition were weird little guys, lonely and depressed outcasts beset with neuroses and maladies. Well adjusted people, it seems, do not feel the need for deep introspection.

And this tracks. A couple of decades ago I developed a mild reputation for being able to see how systems worked, particularly in social or community online environments, and in hindsight this was because I struggled with them so got good at mapping them out before engaging. People who don’t struggle just dive in and so have no sense of an overview. Where this fell down was me assuming I then had the ability to see how they could be improved — mapping and building are very much not the same thing.

Nick Land is very much a weird little man with strange ideas, who mapped the world as he perceived it and went on to make some rather shall-we-say bold diagnoses about what needed to happen next. So it’s been fascinating to see him taken up as a major thinker in accelerationist circles. The billionaires of Silicon Valley are building their AI god on the words of this guy? Really?

While I have little time for Land himself, given the worst people in the world are using him as a foundation to wreck our future he’s probably worth looking at. And it turns out his proponents have totally misunderstood him, according to Vincent Lê in this piece. Which, you know, tracks.

Land’s ideas radically diverge from the reigning conceptions of accelerationism today. His original formulation in the 1990s is clearly opposed to its white supremacist vulgarisation: he has zero interest in any violent return to tradition, or indeed in preserving any human populations at all. This vulgarisation selectively takes his notion that accelerating the dynamics of the modern world to breaking point will bring about some revolutionary phase transition. So-called ‘accelerationists’ operating in this mode then take a step backwards. Instead of embracing what Land sees as a phase transition beyond humanity altogether, they envision the revival of conservative human traditions.

It might seem that Land is closer to effective accelerationism’s defence of capitalism. Yet he is hardly a typical Right-wing libertarian who contends that capitalism is good because it generates prosperity and personal freedom. On the contrary, for him, capitalism is ‘good’ precisely because it is alienating, dehumanising and will eventually wipe us out. While the effective accelerationists find an affinity in his rhetorically seductive fervour for techno-capitalism, they tend to overlook the uncomfortable fact that he believes it to be bringing about the exact opposite future that they want.

I mean, who here hasn’t found themselves following a nihilistic preacher towards annihilation?

Reading:

• Porn star turned late-night TV icon Robin Byrd: ‘Sex is a form of magic’ — Public access cable TV was one of the weirdest glitches in media regulation that could only have come from America. People talk about it as a precursor to the anarchy of early-YouTube but it really just showed that the real world was much stranger than the people running the commercialised world wanted us to imagine, and the regulators forced them to do it. Imagine if the Daily Mail was forced to fund and distribute to newsagents thousands of underground zines from weirdos like us. What a world that would be.

• False Promises - Why carbon capture and storage won’t fix our climate crisis. — One of those tedious animated essays that hijhacks your scrolling for no good reason, but worth it for the graph of actual carbon capture & storage vs industry predictions alongside how we’re doing with solar. There are a few technological climate fixes that if you squint are at least feasible in an ideal world. This is definitely not one of them. Pure snake-oil from vested oil & gas interests.

• Andy Burnham vows to set up No 10 North as ‘nerve centre of rewired Britain’ — As always it’s all in the details. He’s not moving the PM’s office to Manchester, just opening a new department there. But it’s still a big shift and contains some ambitious ideas on changing the culture of government that makes one raise a cautiously optimistic eyebrow.

• Enduring the heat wave in Germany — Loads of tips and explanations of why they may or may not work, some of which I hadn’t seen before.

• Red Hand Files #370 — On growing up, essentially. “Over time, that fiery intensity ebbed away, and I realised that the past wasn’t something to discard but to respect."

• Interesting thread about the reality of running a commercial email or VPN service — Guy did some research and decided it’s not worth it.

• Promises made, promises kept: The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool absolutely looks like shit now — Trump’s gift to writers that just keeps giving.

• The tree that fell on a cyclist, and my boat

Status:

Spent a lovely afternoon in the garden enjoying the cool breeze, at one point considering fetching a hoodie. Madness.

Have been thinking about this blog a fair bit this week. Nothing too concrete — I’m very happy to let it slowly iterate — just marking an awareness of where it’s changing and how it might develop. I’ve found myself batching things up a bit and saving links for later days and I think that might lead to something more curated.

When I started this is was simple a log, in the classic Web Log sense, indiscriminately listing most of the things I’d seen online, like a peek into my browser history. That was about the limit of my capacity back then and as I’ve built up resilience I’ve gotten a bit more selective about what I share and how I share it. I still like the laundry list approach (sidenote: what even is a “laundry list”?) because it gives a broader view of my ingestions and allows for interesting connections and discoveries to be made, and also matches my composting approach of throwing everything in the pile to make a nutritious mulch to feed future growth.

But I’m also drawn to what we might call a zine model, like Patrick does with Sentiers each week. I really like the idea of email or web page that has the same balance of lightness and heft as a 24 page zine, that is both of and off the network, deeply intertwingled and autonomous. I don’t think it’s possible to bridge print and screen without serious copyright violation (or QR codes everywhere) but I think the spirits and intentions of each medium could inform each other.

If pushed I’d say I’m probably moving towards two modes: a daily record of the churn of my life online and off, and a coherent weekly publication of some kind. The funny thing is I don’t really want to separate them. I’d like whatever it is to be both at once. Operating at the intersection of coherence and churn, as one might put in a pretentious artist statement.

Big Read:

Hope is not naive: Rebecca Solnit on backlash, power, and political memory

A long but thoroughly readable (or listenable if you prefer) discussion between Solnit and Kelly Hayes (co-author of Let This Radicalise You) which covers so many topics in just enough depth that the whole thing is like a buffet you can dip in and out of. I’ve long thought Solent to be one of the best thinkers to see us through this current moment and I’m delighted that she also seems like a fun person to hang out with — that rarely happens!

The conversation starts strong: ‌

I’m a bit euphoric, because […] the most San Francisco thing that could possibly happen to a person happened to me. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, at their annual Hunky Jesus Easter extravaganza, canonized me as a saint whose name, which I helped with a bit, is Esperanzapedia. […] What better than to be canonized lovingly by the most flamboyant drag queens in service of the community […] with 10,000 San Franciscans hooting and cheering

Her main theme is that all the disparate causes and issues of the left are really deeply interconnected, and proof is that the far right sees them as one thing. But more importantly they see us, in the broad sense, as a powerful threat, even thought we might feel powerless.

‌ Because if you listen to what MAGA, and Trumpism, and the right is saying, they’re telling us five things. The last two will sound super familiar to everyone, but I don’t think people are hearing the first three clearly enough. So here’s my little list. You all are very powerful, number one. Two, you’ve changed everything. Three, all those different things you do are actually all connected. All the queer rights, human rights, anti-racism, feminism, environmental, climate, anti-colonialism, et cetera. Those are the things we don’t hear clearly enough, maybe because they’re shouting so loudly, “You did all those things and we fucking hate it,” that’s four. And, “We want to change it all back.”

It’s like a version of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, something Solnit explicitly credits her own enlightenment to. “I grew up in San Francisco and gay men have liberated me, a tragically heterosexual woman, by just modelling as all the queer and trans people in San Francisco did […] that there’s so many ways to be human, so many ways to be sexual, so many ways to be attracted to other people or not. And that rules are there to be broken, in those cases."

I’m skimming through this again looking for pull quotes and there’s just too much good stuff. Go read it at your own pace.

I often struggle to hold all the important things together in my mind and to draw the necessary connections to make sense of it, so I was relieved when she says “I know that rambled a little bit, but it’s very hard to connect all the dots without meandering across all fields. Or even connect some of the dots, I should say. All the dots is a tall order."

“All the dots” is a tall order but it’s good to know that they are connected, even if, like mycelium in the soil, we can barely see the connections.

Reading:

• Still blazing after all these years: Mel Brooks at 100 — This reads like an obituary, but it’s nice to read a celebration of someone still alive for a change. Reading this I realise to my horror I still haven’t seen The 12 Chairs. Must rectify that soon.
• The Cult of Optimization — A solid history of the concept from it’s origins in WWII to its deadening hand on all that is good today. “Optimization privileges the measurable over the unmeasurable. And it places the onus for improving society on the ever-striving individual rather than asking more fundamental, structural questions about why systems work as they do and whom they empower and disempower."
• Finally: Someone who wants to reform Westminster has the power to do it — Ian Dunt is cautiously optimistic about Burnham in Westminster. “Might he fail? Yes, absolutely. Might he not even really bother trying? Sure. But honestly: when was the last time we saw a scenario like this?"
• Janet Street-Porter introduces the Post-War Architecture Collection — A selection of archive programmes on the iPlayer.
• Earth’s underground fungus network is so gigantic that if you stretched it out, it would reach to other star systems — The global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons.
• Phil Gyford’s weeknotes

Watching:

• True Facts: The ferret and the plague ‌(6:55) — More about the ticks on the prairie dogs the ferrets eat than the ferrets themselves, but all the better for it.

Listening:

• I’ve been making good progress with Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists, finishing the first part which covers the shift of Palestinian resistance from a local movement to an international campaign through the evolution of plane hijackings. (This nicely fits with that story about the Boeing 747 I posted yesterday, making me wonder how close I came to being in a hijacking in my youth.) Burke’s format is nicely established now, telling big-picture history through the personal stories of the characters who actually hijacked the planes and set the bombs. It’s a surprisingly neutral tone for an account of people who were best useful idiots caught up in their own righteousness and at worst evil fuckers, but somewhat refreshing for it. Next we move to Germany…

Music:

• Listened to some more of Iwo Jedynecki’s Phil Glass covers on his accordion (do they call them covers in the classical world?) and not only are they really good and odd, they reminded me of that classic “incredibly strange” album But You’ve Never Heard Gershwin With Bongos, which brought a big smile.

Wally found a new cool spot in the garden, with a buffet.

Status:

Heatwave day five? Temperatures were still pretty high and the house has definitely not cooled down yet, so yeah, I reckon so. But it has been overcast and breezy for most of today, and as I’m writing this a rain shower occurred, so we’re definitely nearly done. For now, anyway. Forecast shows 30°c on Monday—week. Yay.

I managed to avoid expending my new-found joie de vivre from having rested well through the heatwave, but I have been plotting for how to keep the house cooler for the next one.

A friend mentioned they’d opened their loft hatch to get it to act as a chimney, pulling cool air into the rest of the house. Our loft is like an oven and I’m pretty sure it warms the bedrooms, but the roofers did put a couple of vents in there to help with damp so I figured I’d give it a go. No visible draft so I’m going to have a look at these so-called vents, once the temperature is less hostile up there, and see if they actually do anything.

I also remembered I have the skin of a two-metre³ hydroponics tent which I had adapted into a camera obscura. It’s silver-lined so would work brilliantly as a shade and there’s probably enough of it to cover the windows on the front of our house. I just need to fix them temporarily in place and I may have figured out how to do that with just a couple of screws in the brickwork.

I really want to whitewash the roof tiles but I think that might be outside of my capabilities.

Big Read:

• The Boeing 747 begins its final descent 🪜 — Lovely article about the aircraft that is a little older than me. I have memories of flying in these in the 1970s, including going up the spiral stairs to the lounge and visiting the crew in the cockpit. (My dad flew a lot for business and sometimes took me with him, long story for another day). They seeded a sense that flying was special and exciting, one which I definitely don’t hold today where flying is horrible and unfortunate. Also I love any writing that starts in an aircraft boneyard, one of the most 20th century places you can imagine. Hello Don DeLillo, hello Koyaanisqatsi.
  • (Yes, the aircraft boneyard scene in DeLillo’s Underworld is B52s, not 747s, but the point stands)
  • (And yes, the 747 in Koyaanisqatsi is taxiing at an airport, not abandoned in the desert. Don’t @ me.)

Reading:

• “If you can’t stand by a feature, you shouldn’t launch it.” — Talking about Apple and other software companies releasing new features and then never maintaining them, but this applies to so much more and is one reason I don’t like the fetishisation of startups.
• Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’ — Been a fan of Eggers since his audacious autobiography but especially for the work he does off the page, 862 Valencia, et al. So it was good to check in. I didn’t realise he was quite so offline. Admirable, really.
• As the tide turns against Putin, beware the drowning man 🪜 — Has some astonishing statistics about war in Ukraine. “The average life expectancy of a new [Russian] recruit — from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone — lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks. Once they are sent onto the battlefield, Russian fighters survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes." Monthly casualties are 30,000. Even if these numbers are exaggerated it’s still madness.
• Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn review – child of the revolution — The son of the Weather Underground leader has written a book about them. Adding to my list — should be a good accompaniment to The Revolutionists.
• First major hydropower projects in Great Britain in 40 years given go-ahead — I’m a huge fan of the Dinorwig battery and would be shocked it’s been 40 years since we last built one of these in the UK, but that was the era of selling off infrastructure to extractive capitalists with no interest in the future. Here’s hoping we’re past that now.

Music:

• The first two pieces on this episode of Night Tracks caught my ear.
  • Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon by Dedalus Ensemble
  • Phil Glass’s Etudes no. 2 by Iwo Jedynecki

The unintentional wildlife garden next door looks to be producing a bumper crop of blackberries this year.

Status:

Heatwave day four, and we’re over the worst of it. At around 3pm I realised it was the warmest it was going to be for the next 10 days, according to the forecast, and a lovely breeze started. The house is still too hot, thanks to the bricks holding the heat like they’re designed to, but that should dissipate soon. Meanwhile we’re in the garden.

Personally I feel great, which might seem odd while everyone is melting into apathy and frustration. But as I noted during the May heatwave, this is perfect for my chronic fatigue pacing. The climate is preventing me from doing anything and so my mind and body haven’t had a chance to get exhausted for four whole days. Now the temperatures are receding I feel like I’m fully restored and ready for anything!

Of course I’m not and have to be really careful this weekend, but it’s so lovely to have that sensation for the first time in such a long time.

Hogwatching:

• Looking after the hedgehogs in our back garden ‌(5:45) — Because we’re outside late in the evening we’re crossing over with when the hedgehog is about, sometimes more closely than we realise. Check the timestamps.

Reading:

No commentary on these today I’m afraid.

• Just Two Things on Grenfell and David Hockney
• Heat, humidity and housing: why British heatwaves hit differently
• If you aren’t terrified by this heatwave, you should be
• How Paris is harnessing the Seine to replace air-con
• Paul Watson’s Month notes: June 2026
• Shower beers

Listening:

• Origin Story: Think Tanks part 2 — Starts with a takedown of the pernicious Tufton Street arseholes, gets that out of the way and then settles into a fairly optimistic survey of how useful it is to have bodies that can get policies and legislations drafted for governments that are basically firefighting once they’re in office and don’t have time to think. Just keep the far right libertarian oil money out of it.