Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

“I am smoking. A. Faaaag."

Status:

Rest day. Made another cut on the bath panel project and my sister came over for a catch up (all is well) but otherwise did nuffink. Although I’ve got a stinging headache this evening so maybe I did too much.

Listening:

• Naomi Klein on Trumpism and Our Age of ‘Unlikely Bedfellows’ | The Ezra Klein Show - (Two Kleins, etc.) This is one of those “if you click on one thing…” links in that I got a lot out of it and would recommend it to all. It mostly serves as a digest of her book Doppelgänger, specifically the stuff about the far-right reactionary mirror world of Steve Bannon et al. But there’s plenty more and it concludes with some good thoughts on community, reflecting on the resistance in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and diagnoses of why the billionaires are backlashing. “I think they’re angry that they no longer get treated like gods. And that feels like being terrorised to Mark Andreessen." Just put aside an hour and listen. Transcript and audio on NYT is unpaywalled at the moment, via Sentiers who has more commentary.

Reading:

• ‘Wow, people were so angry at Labour!’ Green MP Hannah Spencer on politics, plumbing, smears and snobbery - ‌“The common ground that a lot of us have, that anger and that frustration, boils down to the same thing. It’s being treated like shit by people who are absolutely laughing at us.”
• Reason and Passion - ‌David Hume blows into his hand, making farting noises in objection to Plato

Booking:

• We are making a film about Mark Fisher - It’s showing in Birmingham as part of the Flatpack Festival at the newly refurbished Edge, both of whom I have a lot of fondness for, so I’m going to make my best effort to attend.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf ‌(36:15)

Music:

• Four Tet - Couldn’t sleep and needed something chewy but calming to occupy my brain so decided to work through the Four Tet back catalogue. Somewhat amusingly Apple Music have conflated his albums with those of 4tet, a Czech vocal harmonising four piece who do cover versions, so when their interpretation of the Addams Family theme came on I thought “that’s a brave choice”. Took a while to find the Czechs on the web and in doing so discovered there are quite a few musical four-pieces doing a play on Quartet. (I, of course, had never seen the connection and thought it was something to do with the Vietnam war.)

Telly:

• Deadloch
• University Challenge - My brain shut down a couple of times to protect itself.

Status:

Sleepy sleepy sleepy today. No energy at all, and content to just lean into that.

A few people in my streams are moaning about the clock changes but I have to say it never bothers me. I wake up at some random time anyway and get used to the lighter or darker evenings within a couple of days. If I had to choose I’d say summertime hours all year round, but that’s just because I’m rarely if ever up before double figures so it doesn’t bother me what time we assign to sunrise. Couple this with my relative immunity to SAD and I’m easy really. This has been a counting-my-blessings paragraph.

I’ve started copying these daily status paragraphs into monthly digests on my long-dormant other blog, just to see how they read. Inspired by the format of Alan Bennett’s diaries which flit between the mundane and the profound, though clearly not of that pedigree. Will sit with it for a bit and then quietly publish if I’m happy with them.

Reading:

• Why we made a film about Mark Fisher called We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher - I remain healthily skeptical about the film itself until I get to see it (which might be in a while since they’re sticking to in-person screenings right now) but I very much enjoyed this rationalisation for its existence, being a neat rundown of Fisher’s life and work and the meaning behind it, and do applaud the motivation to move it on to whatever the next stage might be.
• Warren Ellis' notes on Hail Mary - Some interesting observations, particularly on scriptwriting choices, and no major spoilers that weren’t in the trailer, I think.
• A lot of Opportunities: Pet Shop Boys' Please revisited - We’re at the stage where albums that came out when I was 13 going on 14 are having their 40th anniversary retrospectives. Loved this bit: “recurring themes in Tennant’s writing, namely doomed love, self-doubt and a tension between nihilism and intellectual indoctrination."

Skimming:

• Long COVID Treatment Guide - A summary of treatments, supplements and medications that have been tested on people with varying forms of Long Covid. Reading it started to trigger my symptoms but it’s intended to be discussed with a medical professional so I’ll send it to my occupational therapist and we can talk about it next time we meet. (Sent to me by a fellow LC sufferer.)

Watching:

• Snakes and Ladders ‌(52:59) - audio of Alan Moore’s performance playing over panels from the comic adaptation by Eddie Campbell.
• I spent 2 weeks restoring this chair ‌(29:54)

Listening:

• How Reading Made Us: 3. How Reading Made Our Politics - Slept through half of it but to be honest I’m not too bothered to re-listen.

Music:

• Angine de Poitrine - Apparently this weird duo are blowing up with “the kids” and I’m delighted to see weird shit like this can still make an impact. It’s sort of like what if Lightning Bolt were a microtonal motorik comic published in one of Fantagraphics' weirder anthologies, except more so? Here’s their website.

Telly:

• Deadloch
• LOL: Last One Laughing UK

And and Or, as I’ve named them, two sibling black cats who are rarely seen together, exploring my neighbour’s new concrete pad.

Status:

Chum Gareth came over today for a chat about the zine archive. Ironically, just as I’d taken it offline and was content not to think about it for a few years, he’d messaged with the wheeze to do an exhibition of it at the university where he works. To which I replied “errrrrrrrmmm…” and invited him over for tea.

I’m not saying anything will happen to it, and I’m not saying it won’t, but he has a much better sense of what it contains and how I feel about it going on show. Right now I think the best practice would be to select a few interesting items that might be inspirational to the students and focus on them, ideally with the permission of the original creators, rather than dealing with it as a whole archive, but who knows.

What I do know is after Gareth left I had to wind down with a jigsaw and then slept for two hours. So I probably shouldn’t be too involved!

Reading:

• On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse - This is so good. Like a lot of people I’ve cited Audre Lorde without fully understanding what she meant by “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and just moulding it to fit whatever I was struggling to articulate, so if nothing else this is a good correction to that void of ignorance which I enjoyed filling. It also has some good advice on how to take her intended message and use it accurately and effectively.
• Anil Dash: Endgame for the Open Web - It’s all over, apparently. I was saying to Gareth today that it feels to me like “the internet”, as in the stuff that’s not on corporate platforms, is becoming underground again. I’m not saying that’s a good or a bad thing but it’ll certainly be interesting to look back on in a decade or two.
• Born on the Death Star - Jay Babcock’s countercultural ephemera roundup. Strummer and the Dead, Fred Dibnah, rent parties and psychedelic entities.

Listening:

• Origin Story: Introvert / Extrovert - Fun mid-season episode looking into the origin of the Introvert and Extrovert concepts featuring Ian Dunt recounting the platonic yet erotic love affair between Freud and Jung.

Music:

• All You Fascists Bound to Lose - Bette Midler - after Woodie Guthrie.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Having now re-watched all of season three over a couple of weeks I can safely say it’s top notch telly, five stars. Well done everyone.
• Deadloch - One of our favourite shows of a couple of years ago is back. Fi was cackling all the way through.

Status:

Very much a crash day today. Thought I might be OK when I got up (which is not the normal way of things) but Fi asked me to explain something I should have had no problem explaining and I stumbled and fell into a brain fog. So have been taking it easy as my mind jumps from zombie to spiralling. Did I do too much yesterday? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? Not me. My brain is not doing the figuring things out thing today.

In other news I had a message from my GP surgery via an alert to the NHS app. I think it’s probably best quoted in its entirety.

‌We introduced EMMA, an AI receptionist a few weeks ago, with the intention of improving the service. It hasn’t worked as expected, and we know lots of people have found it frustrating. We have switched it off today.

I see Wes Streeting’s plan to use AI in the NHS to save money is going well.

Reading:

• Scientists film whale giving birth while other whales work together to help her

Watching:

• Restoring a French bread guillotine ‌(20:49)
• Restoring a rusty ratchet wrench set ‌(13:17)

Listening:

• In Our Time: Silicon - Fascinating stuff on “the role silicon compounds play in the biology of life on Earth, on the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the cycling of elements between land, oceans and atmosphere that sustains us."

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Wally has started digging his dust bath patch so I thought I’d get a photo of the action. Instead he looks like he’s praying towards Mecca. (I checked and he’s off by about 40°.)

Status:

Slept much better and felt able to do some mild woodworking today. I’ve been working on the bath panel I planned out earlier this month at a glacial pace, making a cut then sitting with it for a couple of days, then making another, but had got to the stage where I needed to get out the router, which requires a bit of brain clarity as it’s not a tool I have a lot of experience with. I took my time, thought it through and managed to make a decent cut that fitted. Yay! And in my victorious reverie I figured I’d capitalise on this and do the next cut, forgetting the first rule of chronic fatigue: do not trust your adrenalised self. Cue spectacular failure. Thankfully I have spare wood.

I have been working on this on and off for 18 days and am about a third of the way through. I reckon it’s an afternoon project, if that. Pacing, innit.

Reading:

• AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying - A fascinating and disturbing article that quickly dispenses with the AI-chatbot-gone-awry narrative (by explaining why everyone gets this shit wrong) and dives deep on how the military has tried to shorten the “kill chain” with, as they say, disastrous results for those on the ground. In short, this is nothing new, just faster and more, and unless we muzzle the likes of Palintir it’s just going to get worse.
• H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright typographic mystery - An H on the front of the Unity Temple in Chicago is upside down. There now follows a deep dive into when that error happened. See also half of Hospital H signs (in the US at least) are upside down.
• Meta Loses Two Landmark Cases Regarding Product Safety and Children’s Use; Google Loses One - Nick rounds up some reporting on the ruling. I particularly liked this outrageous quote from Google in the Guardian’s report: “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site”. O RLY?
• Everyone’s very angry online right now - At least they are from where Garbage Day is sitting. Thankfully I don’t sit there. (Angry people in my streams get muted for a week and then unfollowed.)

Watching:

• Colin Furze: The Secret Garage Car Lift Part 1 ‌(29:52)
• Fill my parsnip tubes with me ‌(3:44) - I’m mildly fascinated by Gerald’s method of growing parsnips in drain pipes to keep them as straight as possible for show competitions. He harvests one in this video. I’ve had a quick search and I can’t see any mention of this technique.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - The Doug episode. Nuff said.
• Last One Laughing Ireland - such a weird show. On the one hand it’s hilarious and I love it, on the other it’s kinda cringe reality slop. But I laughed and have some new comedians to look out for now.

Status:

Mad March weather today, literally swinging from bright blue skies to thunderous clouds in minutes, then back again. Even the rabbits were freaked out by a sudden hail storm.

This cartoon strip came to mind today.

I saw it on some feed at the start of the month and was struck by how good it was, like a really professional piece of work, but of course there was no credit attached. A bit of reverse image searching revealed it’s by the late Richard Thompson who worked at the Washington Post from the 80s until his death from Parkinsons in 2016. It looks like it’s from his weekly series Richard’s Poor Almanac which is running on GoComics.

Otherwise today was a light pottering day. I slept really badly but didn’t want to just rest up, so did some light chores around the house. Turns out the filter in the dishwasher needs cleaning. Who knew?

Reading:

• An exploit kit that can hack millions of iPhones has been publicly leaked - Anyone who can upgrade to iOS 26 should do so as soon as possible. This is not a drill. And so my holdout on all the awful liquid glass bullshit has come to an end. It’s ugly, but with judicious application of accessibility settings, plus the fact that I don’t really use my phone for much other than reading articles and listening to podcasts these days, means I can probably deal. (Thankfully this exploit doesn’t seem to affect the Mac so my actual computer can remain usable for a while longer.)
• Google is automatically rewriting news headlines in its search results - One the one hand, fuck Google for playing god, but on the other hand, online headlines are often terrible and click-baity so re-writing them to actually describe what’s at the link is not a terrible idea. I mean, I do it here when a good page has a title so bad I’m embarrassed to have it on my site. Related: Google just patented the end of your website with an “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user.”
• “A new world is being born”: Rebecca Solnit on the slow revolution the far right cannot tolerate - Really looking forward to Solnit’s new book because we need a bit of grounded, long-term positivity in the fight against the omni-awfulness. Related: The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism.
• Welcome to Paris, the city that said no to cars - A walk through the astonishing changes Paris has undergone in the last decade. And they seem to both be working and be popular.

Watching:

• House Party! (1983) ‌(20:48) - A student short film that Reginald Hudlin later remade as the 1990 hit comedy film. Early hip-hop delights with shades of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock.
• Ants Pants: Buying and using the biggest ECHO chainsaw - Echo CS7310SX ‌(1:58:42) - Andris buys the biggest chainsaw he can and cuts up some wood.

Subscribing:

• ComicCaster creates RSS feeds for comic strips that don’t have them (such as on GoComics) so you can add them to your feed reader. I have a nice folder of daily comics that I read over breakfast which will now be a bit bigger. (Adding Nancy, classic and current, and the above mentioned Richard’s Poor Almanac)

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Last One Laughing Ireland

Status:

Had a visit from a puppy today. Nothing else that happened today matters.

Reading:

• ‘The most stunningly awful wonderful record’: how The Shaggs became rock’s most divisive band. - One of the great things about the 20th century is the infinite amount of weird outsider art there is to discover. Never heard of The Shaggs, despite them being championed by Zappa and Cobain. Not sure I can listen to the whole album in one sitting but definitely enjoyed a dip. Will keep an eye out for the documentary.
• Ibram X Kendi on book bans and far-right fear-mongering - A reminder to put How to be an Antiracist back on my to-read list and to check out his new book, Chain of Ideas, which looks right up my street.
• Self-Defense Techniques for Jazz Musicians - ‌Take five. Have a smoke. Offer one to the person hitting you. Ask them what music they like. Listen intently and then tell them how what they like can be traced back to jazz. Get punched again.
• Girlguiding gives trans girls and women until September to leave UK organisation - I don’t want to rise to rage-bait but that quote from Helen Joyce from Sex Matters is just fucking disgraceful. Shame on you.

Looking:

• Hurvin Anderson review – this haunted, hazy, beautiful show is like stumbling through someone’s memories - Anderson had a show at Birmingham’s Ikon a while back and it was tremendous. Would highly recommend this to those who can get to Tate Britain.

Watching:

• Eyelet Press Restoration ‌(15:22)
• What if you kept digging downward? ‌(2:52)

Listening:

• How Reading Made Us: pt2. How Reading Made Our Feelings - Interesting stuff about the rise of the novel giving people access to the interiority of others, though tempered by a bit too much Steven Pinker (an era has the public intellectuals it deserves, I guess) and a jarringly wrongheaded conclusion by the host about social media. “If the bias of the novel is towards empathy, the bias of social media is towards rage.” Well, yes, if you’re using the stuff that is optimised for rage. I know I have gained much empathy for others by engaging with them on non-commercial online environments, especially those based around text. You know, like novels. Anyway…

Telly:

• University Challenge
• The Singers
• Last One Laughing Ireland

Status:

Very much a resting day. Slept a lot, then went back to bed later. Feeling OK but definitely like something relatively minor could tip me over.

Fi excitedly told me she’d received an extras call for a “kissing couple” who are already in a relationship, which meant I could accompany her on this new adventure. While sitting around for nine hours with occasional bursts of “action!” sounds potentially doable with my condition, I think I need her to have a go first and report back before I even contemplate applying. But you never know! (Also, surely they want pretty young things snogging in the background, not us crones.)

Admin:

Have re-jigged the links categories - Overnight Listening is now just Listening and moved down next to Watching, because I’m sleeping much better at the moment and would like the option to listen to audio in the daytime. Plus, as you’ve maybe noticed, it’s mostly Night Tracks at the moment.

Reading:

• The Histomap - I feel sure I’ve seen this before, maybe in print or maybe on the early internet? Either way, the origin story is new to me and quite interesting.
• Thomas Aquinas on Sex - Sartre put him right.
• Why Lab Coats are White - Or, why surgeons moved from heavy frock coats to something less gross. “The surgeon operated in a slaughter-house-suggesting frock coat of black cloth. It was stiff with the blood and the filth of years. The more sodden it was, the more forcibly did it bear evidence to the surgeon’s prowess.”

Watching:

• Syringe feeding a baby beaver ‌(2:58)
• Laura Kampf ‌(32:11)

Listening:

• How reading made us: 1. How reading made our brains - A literary reviewer realises he can’t read anymore and wonders what’s going on with his brain. I’ve often thought about the relationship between various forms of literacy and how we think and process the world, so this looks to be very much up my street. (This whole Understand strand looks worth exploring too.)

Clicking:

• 100 Jumps - the new hotness in incredibly addictive single button games. I think it’s hard because it leverages an optical illusion, but that knowledge doesn’t help. So far I’ve reached 40 jumps.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Last One Laughing Ireland - Aisling Bea and a bunch of people we don’t know (yet).

Status:

Felt OK this morning so we joined my sister and our mum’s old friend at the allotment for tea, and saw loads of other friends there and on the way (including Roo who is dogsitting a huge friendly rottweiller who was a delight to meet). And then in the afternoon great-neph M hung out with me in the garden while I lay in the hammock trying to photograph birds. Had one success (above).

M had a go with the Nikon and seemed to not hate it – I think he might respect it as a piece of technology with loads of buttons and dials. I offered to lend him my old Nikon if he was interested and he didn’t say no. He’s very demand resistant so you just have to leave things open for him and let him come to them on his own terms, but it’d be fun if he did get into photography when he’s a bit older.

And then I had done plenty so had a nap. Tomorrow will definitely be a recovery day and then I’ll take stock on what was my first full rest week.

Overnight listening:

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber - Finished this, and I’m not really sure it was worth it for me. I think the problem is Graeber is a proper anthropologist who does the work and I got a bit lost in the granular details while waiting for the big ideas. It’s good to know the work was done but I was satisfied with just the introduction and the conclusion. On the plus side, the detailing of the sociopolitical nuances of the various Malagasy people did help me get to sleep a few times.

Reading:

• We are living in a period of political anti-intellectualism. But in pop culture, clever is the new cool - While I tend to avoid anything about fashion and trends, because I have no interest in or knowledge of such things, I do have a soft spot for Jess Cartner-Morley’s writing, so I enjoyed this article in a slightly perverse way. Once you get past the “famous people are reading books in the same way they wear clothes” stuff there’s some interesting observations about how intellectualism intersects with culture. I’d say it’s always been thus and the book trade is no less superficial than the fashion biz, in its ways. And a young person reading a book has always been sexy.
• John Allison: Easy vs Hard - Delighted to see John has made his occasional musings on his cartoonist craft open to all.
• God is a comedian - “Three weeks into the Iran war, reality has passed through the looking glass, out the other side, and is now selling tickets to the gift shop. What follows is not satire. Satire requires exaggeration, and you cannot exaggerate something that is already operating at maximum absurdity. This is simply the news."
• Sentiers 395: Habermas and his coffeehouses ⊗ The case for radical solar optimism - Issues of Sentiers seem to be swinging like a pendulum for me right now. Last week I had zero interest in anything Patrick posted, this week it was like my own personal fanzine. And that’s cool. I enjoyed the coffeehouse stuff (I remember Ben Hammersley making this analogy with blogging around 2002, back in his longhair frock-coat days) and I always like a good solar story. Have lined up a couple of other links for reading later in the week.
• School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books - one for the “what right wing fuckers do in the US, they will eventually try here” files. That said, the mention of Greater Manchester reminded me of James Anderton’s reign of terror in the 80s, so maybe it’s home grown rot.

Watching:

• My Favorite Twilight Knockoff ‌(1:40:32) - Jenny Nicholson is the OG long-form video essayist for me, talking at great length about subjects which I never thought I’d be interested in, in a manner which holds my attention to the end. I love how she just pops up every year or so with a video in exactly the same style and format, like nothing has changed.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Fi lopped the fruit trees today.

Status:

Had a visit from an old friend of my mum’s today. They met at university about 60 years ago and had always stayed in touch, going on family holidays together in the 80s. All my parents friends seemed to get divorced (it was the vogue) and when this one did she went to live in a communal living community and has stuck with that kind of alternative living ever since. Of my mother’s friends I think she’s probably the one I got on with the best, partly because she understood all the nonsense I was interested in, but also because she and my mum seemed to be cut from the same cloth. That cloth may have made radically different garments, but it was the same cloth.

So it was lovely to see her, albeit frustrating that I wasn’t capable of having the level of conversation I wanted to. I’m very aware that she’s one of the few connections I have left to my parents and their lives, but there was no way we could get into all that in the time allocated. I suspect I’ll now be experiencing feelings for a few days and will try to embrace them as best I can. She’s staying with my sister (who is just down the road now) so we might be able to meet up again tomorrow if I’m up for it. Hope I am.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Dame Area - friends Julia and Joe went to see them at the Hare & Hounds this week and it looks like the kind of gig I would have enjoyed back in the day. Liking what I hear.
• Steinski & The Mass Media - The Motorcade Sped On - Apparently this was given away with the NME in 1987, which is definitely not where I hear it. I suspect it came my way through some Coldcut set or other in the 90s. Magnificent piece of work though. (via Woodrow)

Reading:

• The Old Internet is Still Here - Interesting theory that the old internet is still the same as it was back in the day, it’s just the rest of the landscape has gotten bigger and louder.
• ‘We need messier maps’ - Notable to me for the last section about Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map, of which I am a great fan, with some nuggets about it’s creation. “What I think has been lost is the flexibility that was central to Fuller’s original idea. When Life magazine first published his map, they showed several different versions of how the world could be arranged. The posters you can now buy … show just one. The sense of possibility … has been reduced to a single authoritative image."

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Splitting Everything - The Firewood Movie pt2 ‌(3:08:53) - “Welcome to another episode of “Wood”.
• Neighbours (1953) ‌(8:07) - A classic animation I vaguely remember seeing on TV.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Scrubs - I am getting quite irrationally bugged by the new opening credits where JD swipes his tablet towards the big screen to move an Xray onto it. In the old show he clips it onto a light box, so this new one is to show we’re in the modern digital era. Except that shit is sci-fi! It’s not possible to swipe an image from your tablet to a screen like that! I mean, it should be, but it’s not! Which means Scrubs season 10 is taking place in a sci-fi universe, which I can work with I guess.

Status:

Bit of a sludgy day today. Couldn’t get going at all this morning, didn’t get much pottering done and had a sleep in the afternoon. I’d probably categorise this as a minor crash, which is positive as it’s not a proper big crash. My body needed to rest, so I let it.

We have a magpie building a nest in a tree in our garden, remarkably close to where we hang out, although it’s a very thorny tree so it probably feels safe. It occasionally peeks out before flying off and I realised I could actually get a decent photo with the long lens. So I spent a while waiting for it to appear. No joy today so I had to make do with the above cropped-in shot of it in a faraway tree.

Fi was off this morning to register as an extra [redacted as this probably counts as “mentioning on social media”]. Friends of hers in London have done this sort of thing, so she knows the basics. Apparently the main requirement is you must have period-specific hair – no highlights or whatnot – and apparently Fi has “great hair”. [Another bit redacted.]

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Dadaism - This was a lot of fun and definitely will be worth a proper re-listen. I like the idea that young people gathered in neutral Switzerland to escape the madness of 1910’s Europe. I wonder where they might gather today?

Music:

• Fi’s got a bit obsessed about that Conrad Taylor Rosalía remix thing from the other week so I gave it a listen. I tried my hardest but all I could think of was Put a Donk on it which, to my horror, is 17 years old.

Reading:

• Britain’s sauna boom heats up as people seek warmth of human connection - A fluff piece, for sure, but I’m intrigued by this bit: ‌Precisely how taking a sauna triggers its benefits is still being studied, but the general idea is that it places the body under controlled heat stress, producing responses similar to moderate exercise, such as walking. I am unable to do sufficient levels of exercise at the moment so I wonder if this would help?
• Jenny Murray dies aged 75 - I grew up with my mum listening to her on the radio and have fond memories of her voice, memories that I refuse to allow her subsequent career as a reactionary Daily Mail columnist to tarnish.

Watching:

• James Baldwin: “There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some. There’s more than one would think." ‌(1:16)
• Villeneuve: Ride the Coming Storm ‌(3:26) - Supercut of shots that evoke an eerie post-human landscape from the films of Denis Villeneuve.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - this is such a good show…

Status:

Took things a bit easier today. The main task was setting up the hammock in the dome with wifi and shade so that I might lie in the hammock with wifi and shade. Which I then proceeded to do. I guess operation get-off-the-bloody-sofa can be declared a success (at least until it rains).

Have updated the About page, so go read that if you want to know about things.

Mothballed the BugPowder zine archive for now. I might bring it back in a different form but I don’t have the capacity or interest to finish the project properly and I had a request to remove something, so I decided to just pull it for now. And it had fuckall traffic so no-one will miss it. All data is safe, of course.

While I’m not interested in the zines I am quite interested in how I put the site together. It was originally just a single status page with stats on how much I’d scanned but it grew into thousands of pages. If I’d intended it to be that big I would never have started but by iterating a tiny bit every day I created a pretty impressive resource. I’m wondering if I can replicate that with something I actually care about now, and how I might start without scaring myself off with my goals…

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• MMMA - Some good ol' deep doom drone via Julia.

Reading:

• Homework till midnight and ‘one breakdown a week’: the mysterious art school keeping a forgotten style alive - The trompe d’oeil school in Brussels.
• Hundreds of hungry mosquitoes, a student volunteer and a mesh suit helped us figure out how these deadly insects reach their targets - Fantastic 3D visualisation of mosquito flight patterns. And yes, I’m itching all over from reading this.
• Not new. And that’s OK. - Josie George on the sameness of every day with chronic fatigue. “I am in the same place with the same views I’ve had my whole adult life so I can’t describe to you anything new that you will not have seen or heard about before. […] And it’s ridiculous how much this feels like failure." One thing photography taught me was nothing is ever the same. The world is constantly changing in ways imperceptible in the moment but evident over time. Some of my favourite art (Noah K Everyday, Sitting in a Room) explores and embraces those micro-changes because they access a deep truth.
• The curious origins of the dollar symbol - ‌In 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began minting coins using silver from a mine in Joachimsthal. The coin was dubbed the joachimsthaler, which was then shortened to thaler, the word that proceeded to spread around the world. It was the Dutch variation, the daler, that made its way across the Atlantic in the pockets and on the tongues of early immigrants, and today’s American-English pronunciation of the word dollar retains its echoes. Thaler thaler bills y’all.
• NHS was ‘on brink of collapse’ during pandemic, Covid inquiry finds - We have a friend who worked on the Covid wards at Birmingham Hospital. She has PTSD and has had fuckall support for it.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

It’s starting…

Status:

I have no doubt we’ll get some snow or something in the next few weeks but today clearly marked the end of winter and the start of outdoors life. I can tell because all my neighbours are suddenly in their gardens.

Because the rabbits live in the shed at the bottom of the garden, every day come rain or shine we sit out with them as they run on the grass. But I remember the days before rabbits when the garden just didn’t exist for six months of the year, and it’s always entertaining to see the other humans emerge blinking from their back doors, edging their way onto their lawns and figuring out how the mower works again.

Soon the kids will be on the trampolines and that young couple a few fences down will be having their friends over in the evenings. I greet them like a wizened old hermit who’s been in these hills since before they were hills and think about getting my ear plugs.

Rest week continues. A couple of glitches in the brain department meant I had to stop and do my breathing exercises but otherwise I’ve been doing the prescribed pottering, as per the NHS advice. Fi was out for the afternoon and when I recounted the stuff I’d done around the house she said it seemed like a lot (I have historically accidentally done a lot and then crashed, so she’s right to be concerned) but I’d done everything slowly and in stages, taking what would seem to be excessive breaks between steps and listening to when my body says “go on, just another job” and telling it to fuck off.

The result is analogous to being on a canal barge, or watching a tortoise. It’s goes agonisingly slowly but before you know it it’s way over there. Slow and steady gets the small things done and hopefully avoids the crash.

That said I have a fair bit of tinnitus when writing this so definitely no more today.

Overnight listening:

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Reading:

• What Was Music? - On the distinction between lo-fi and lofi.
• “Maud is Moving” is out! - Recommended by cartoonist friends of mine.
• Train Dreams review

Watching:

• Laura Kampf ‌(27:10)
• Full restoration of a 1930s doorbell ‌(18:02)

Telly:

• Vladimir - Still not sold on this. Really want to like it but something’s off.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Realised Fi hadn’t seen season 3.

Little bug, large S.

Status:

I’m declaring this a rest week, because I have nothing in my diary and it seems like a good opportunity to find this ever-elusive baseline. So it’s a diet of steady pottering with no big adventures and plenty of rests.

I decided on a new chronic fatigue goal: to write something that isn’t responsive. I’m very happy with how this blog is going but it’s all in response to my day and stuff I’ve seen online, so the framework and boundaries are established and manageable. The next step is to write something from scratch where I have to decide what it’s about and where the edges are. This is a fairly daunting proposition, but not much more daunting than diary/link blogging was a year ago.

Overnight listening:

• Iran: The Three Ayatollahs - From Revolution to Dynasty - hopping back on the Empire podcast for a special about Iran, essentially one of those explainers from someone who’s actually been paying attention to what’s been going on there.

Reading:

• AI job loss research ignores how AI is utterly destroying the internet - While agree with pretty much everything here, I think the rot set in a long time ago with the legitimisation of the SEO industry and the dominance of Instagram et al. And, let’s be frank, it’s very clear most people don’t want to engage with “the internet” because it’s hard work, just like they didn’t want to go to the library or whatever. Whether that’s because they’re too busy or too lazy is moot - most people would rather get a possibly wrong answer from a bot than do the work.
• Compost After Reading is out - Lovely story of how it evolved from a handout to a proper book.

Watching:

• Practical Engineering on the Los Angeles aqueduct ‌(22:58) - I read about how LA diverts so much water from Owens Valley in another state that the subsequent dried out lake is a major source of pollution in Jay Owen’s book Dust, which I highly recommend. Good to see Grady’s take on it from an engineering perspective.
• Dune: Part Three trailer ‌(2:29) - plenty of time to prepare myself for a trip to the cinema…

TIL:

• Field Notes and Fieldnotes are two different things. (Fiona is submitting to the latter and I got quite confused.)

Status:

Rather sleepy day. My quick afternoon nap turned into a long snooze-fest. Must have needed it.

Overnight listening:

• Dream Time: All Queens Day - Celebrating Alice Coltrane - Major confession that I’d assumed Alice Coltrane was John Coltrane’s daughter, not his wife, from which it’s clear I knew nothing about her life. This appalling error has now been corrected, as has my general ignorance about this amazing artist. Always discovering, always learning!

Reading:

• ‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics - The scientist who proposed that trees talk to each other via mycorrhizal fungi, popularising the term Wood Wide Web, which led to a bit of a backlash. Good to get some background and her side of the story.
• These aren’t AI firms, they’re defence contractors. We can’t let them hide behind their models - Most notable to me is this desire to obfuscate accountability is much older and embedded than recent usage of statistical target modelling to decide who to kill.
• The Testament of Ann Lee - review
• Sinners sinks its teeth into Irish settler colonialism
• Kantian Milk

Telly:

• Vladimir - Feels a little Netflix-by-numbers but I’ll give anything with Rachel Weisz a chance.
• University Challenge

Status:

Feeling both good and bad today. Fair mood, reasonable energy, but lots of brain fog. Managed to get one read done by taking my time over it and even then I’m not entirely sure of my thoughts about it (see below).

Brain is probably be being swamped by the news which broke about the co-op building which I was very much involved with until my medical leave (as I’m euphemisticising it today) meant I had to step away. I was at one of the earliest meetings eight years ago so I’m quite emotionally invested in the bloody thing, no matter how much I tell myself I’m not anymore. Really hope my comrades are able to salvage the project but I’m glad I don’t to deal with any of it.

I supposed noting that my inability to help, and to even think about helping, is a consequence of catching Covid is a good way to mark Long Covid Awareness Day.

Overnight listening:

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Reading:

• Who will remember us when the servers go dark? - Long, angry piece about a tension I often feel between the pack-rat need to save and archive everything and the need for humans to loose and forget. I have many regrets about not having items from my childhood and youth thanks to moving house an insane number of times, but I also have this frequent urge to just get rid of what I have and live on a clean slate. I do not know, and fear I will never know, what the balance is. This essay is well worth reading (the website is sadly beyond my tolerance for messy design so I’d recommend hitting the reader button on your browser). Expect lots of criticism of the Californian Ideology but also of Archive Team and the refusal to see a distinction between things-in-the-world and their digital analogues. And much more I can’t summarise here - it felt like every few paragraphs there was something that related to an area of interest. Overall I’m not sure if this should be filed under “folk who put their faith in the internet and now feel betrayed” or if that’s too glib. Sometimes it feels like this is life-or-death stuff, especially when one invokes Palantir et al, but other times I do wonder if anything we’re doing online really matters. Or something. I may return to this later.

Would have read today if had capacity:

• Rebecca Solnit: The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism
• Adam Greenfield: An excerpt from “The Tetrad”
• More than Theoretical Girls: Adele Bertei on the Women of No Wave
• (If I have anything to say about them when I do read them I’ll put it in a future note.)

Watching:

• New Yorkshire Workshop: Renovating a 165 year old handrail ‌(44:17)

Telly:

• Scrubs
• The Knick - Season 1 done. It looks great, thanks to the Soderbergh of it all, but script-wise it’s just another dumb prestige telly show. Fun John Hodgman cameo in the last episodes.

You know winter is over when Wally starts snoozing in the sun.

Status:

Nice weather today and I wanted to get out of the house so spent a couple of hours pottering in the garden, with plenty of breaks in the sun. Nothing too strenuous, just tidying up the detritus of the winter. Felt a little worn afterwards but hopefully won’t trigger a crash. If it does I’ll know not to do that much again. It’s all data.

Heard some news which I thought I’d be OK with but which threw me for a loop somewhat. Having that bastard thing where I have no idea what my emotions are going to do or how to manage them. I feel like in the past I would have processed it with a long conversation over beers, or by writing a long essay or email, or some other intellectual bloodletting, but I can’t do that now without hurting myself. Breathing exercises help a bit.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: Stephen Miller - American Fascist - The f-word can be used carelessly (I try to remember to say someone is doing fascism, rather than being an actual fascist) but in this case it’s hard not to be accurate. Trump’s deputy chief of staff is a fascist, and like fascists from history, it’s not because he’s clever or insightful. He’s just a pathetic “debate-me” goon who knows how to play his boss. A depressing but worthwhile listen.

Reading:

• My cultural awakening: a 60s folk band helped me find my place as a person of colour in Britain - The moment I saw this headline I thought “I bet this is by Zakia Sewell”, and it is. Her radio show helped me through a tough 2025 and I enjoyed her piece in Weird Walk, so I’m a fan and looking forward to her book.
• Gas Town and Bullet Hell - a collection of half-formed thoughts from Matt Jones, some of which I’m not interested in but I did enjoy the stuff about how technology and industry changes our perception and value of time.
• ‘We are a completely different political party’: inside the Greens’ membership boom - One should never put all of one’s hopes and dreams in a political party, but I’m encouraged by this comment, about new members bringing the bad habits of their previous affiliations. “Even if new members wanted to change party policy, it’s not easy. It isn’t a single motion, it’s an 18-month process. You do get some people going: ‘What have I just joined? This isn’t like the Labour party.’” Sounds a lot to me like joining a co-operative. Now, how do we get the co-operative party to switch…

Marking:

• International Long Covid Awareness Day is tomorrow, 15th March.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Cutting Everything - The Firewood Movie ‌(3:08:45)
• I restored almost rotten flowerstand from 1930 ‌(24:32)

Telly:

• Scrubs
• The Knick

Status:

While out in the garden with the rabbits I happened to lean on the fence and saw two pigeons having sex. Spring is here.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Archaea - was expecting an Ancient Greece episode but this is microbiology and pretty fascinating. Will have to give it another listen as a lot of it went over my 1am head. I enjoyed the bit about the Asgard archaea, named for being found in the Loki’s Castle hydrothermal vent: Lokiarchaeota, Thorarchaeia, Odinarchaeia and Heimdallarchaeia. Nice.

Music:

• How Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids - I feel like I have an essay in me about growing up in suburban Croydon in the 80s listening to the Pet Shop Boys, so this essay about growing up in suburban Croydon in the 80s listening to the Pet Shop Boys got me quite excited. No, I wasn’t a queer kid, but I was an odd kid and for an odd kid Croydon was stifling in its conservative conformity, especially the bit of Croydon we moved to in 1985, bordering with Bromley and Beckenham. I understood why punk and David Bowie came from around here and I knew from an early age this place would not define me, or at least I would define myself against it. The Pet Shop Boys were not an explicit influence – I wouldn’t pretend to understand what Tennant was singing about - but they were ever-present. I would do my paper round with those first two albums on my walkman, keeping pace with Chris Lowe’s beat as I shoved rolled up freesheets through the letterboxes of identikit semis (my friend Molly, who is fascinated photos of me as a nerdy kid for some reason, finds this vision so potent she sees it whenever the PSBs come on). I could write so much more but this is already a long paragraph so I’ll end with signing up to Friends Reunited in 2001 and noticing that half the people from my year stayed in Croydon and got a job in the bank or something, and the other half left did something fucking odd. I met up with a couple of them – one was a missing persons private detective while the other had returned from working on fish farms in Africa. The more I think of it, the more I think the Pet Shop Boys were just part of a potent mix. Growing up in Croydon in the 80s was either going to crush you or inspire you. We moved away after my GCSEs in 1989. I think my mum always regretted those four years in suburbia but I was always a bit grateful. It was a perfect place to be a weird teenager.

Reading:

• “This is not the computer for you” - great-neph M is currently going through this with all the discarded smartphones in the family drawers and is loving it. Soon he’ll move to a proper computer and then we’ll be in some glorious trouble.
• Baraka time: Positive psychic power sources left to us by our cultural ancestors - I always enjoy a swim in Jay Babcock’s countercultural detritus.

Looking:

• Longevity and obsoletion impress upon Alexander Endrullat’s intaglio prints - A laptop declared obsolete by its manufacturer is repeatedly pushed through a printing press, producing evidence of its incremental destruction.

Watching:

• Primitive Technology: Hut with underfloor heating (ondol/hypocaust) ‌(14:50)
• the entire Beatles album discography but it’s just numbers ‌(2:51)
• Torbjörn Åhman: Forging a Curved Chisel ‌(7:14)
• Rusty grindstone restoration (16:35)‌

Telly:

• The Knick
• Scrubs

Taken yesterday. Today has not been photography weather.

Status:

Bit tired in the brain today so mostly taking it easy, doing a few stretches, tidying the kitchen, resting and digesting. Got a few promising tabs open but haven’t really had the capacity to read them, so no reading links today. “That’ll give your readers a chance to catch up” says Fiona who last reported 138 tabs in her browser. Which is insane.

Overnight listening:

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
• Night Tracks

Watching:

• ContraPoints: Saw ‌(1:36:13) - Natalie takes on the philosophy of the Saw franchise, which reminded me a bit of when Lindsay Ellis used the Transformers films to teach us about film studies.
• Colin Furze: The MAGLEV skateboard ‌(22:02) - Furze is always just on the edge of “nope, too much” for me but I can’t deny his experiments are fascinating and very well explained. (And I’m clearly not his target audience. I wonder if the great-neph knows about him?)
• Buñuel live at Supersonic Festival 2025 ‌(13:09) - Eugene of Oxbow still doing that thing he does so well.
• Hanna Spencer’s maiden speech ‌(8:02) - yas queen.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - excellent season finale. Overall I’d say four stars, five for the top and tail episodes, three for the middling middle ones, five for the teaching cast (Reno!), three for the kids. Next time, a bit more Treking, a bit less Academy please! (Know that I think kids in sci-fi are great - I loved Skeleton Crew!)

The tree next to Gerry and Tay’s shed is quite something. So is their shed, which I am very jealous of.

Status:

Lucy was going to the allotment and I fancied getting out of the house so we loaded up all the rabbit poop and hay and headed over. It was a lovely day so spreading the task of topping up the compost heap over an hour or so wasn’t a chore. Was nice to catch up with an old friend too.

Overnight listening:

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
• Night Tracks

Music:

• We Are Together Again by Bonnie “Prince” Billy - new album klaxon.

Reading:

• New cheat codes - not sure why this post by Joanne McNeil from 2024 reappeared in my feed reader but I enjoyed revisiting it.
• On the problem of landscape tarp - A righteous rant by Cass Marketos, who has a composting book coming out soon.
• Gen Z lives in the Archive - It’s been 16 years since Paton Oswalt’s Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever essay, so of course we now have people for whom this is just how culture is.

Clicking:

• My ΔE_OK JND is 0.0047 - I can’t say I totally understand the science but a lower number is better and I would recommend taking your time if you can’t distinguish the colours right away.

Archiving:

• Electric Soup - Scans of the Scottish comic from 1989-92, a mix of a crude Viz knock-off and an actual underground comic.

Telly:

• The Knick
• Scrubs - still got it.

Your author and his children.

Status:

Had to go to the doctor’s for a mental health checkup for my paroxetine prescription. Slightly annoying as I could have done it over the phone but we’re all about the in-person these days.

I’ve been on antidepressants on an off all my adult life and mostly see them as a crutch, something to take the edge off and allow me to function. They’re never going to “cure” me, because that’s not their job (at least not for me). They just reduce the quantity and severity of the bad days.

After I’d done a bit of therapy I decided to try coming off them in 2024, the logic being I wasn’t depressed, I was living as an autistic person and my coping mechanisms were fucking me up. But now I was getting some help with that maybe it would be good, or at least interesting, to take the stabilisers off and be “myself” for a while. With the doctor’s support I weaned myself off, just in time for the second dose of Covid with full-on chronic fatigue this time. Within 6 months, and after a disconcerting run of panic attacks, I was back on them again. Ah well.

As the song goes, anti-depressants are so not a big deal. Of course I’m on them. My situation is intermittently quite depressing.

In other news, I fixed the wobbly banister rail on the stairs. It was installed by Fi’s parents, so many decades ago, and the screws had become loose. As always, it’s the sort of job that should just take 10 minutes but which feels unachievable at the moment. So I paced myself and spread it out and it wasn’t a problem. Remove a screw, have a rest, drill a hole, have a rest.

Overnight listening:

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber - I was planning on one of his bigger books, like Debt, but in the end fancied something a bit lighter and more conversational. Plus I’m really getting into this notion that Enlightenment thought had sources outside Europe.

Reading:

• Unfit, Unpaid - In a lot of ways I’m very lucky with my post-Covid chronic fatigue in that I’m being seen by an NHS specialist who can confirm to any skeptics that, yes, I’m unwell. Many people aren’t. This is by a friend of a friend who has had Long Covid for six years now and it’s depressing reading.
• Plain-spoken performance art: A conversation with Laurie Anderson - An interview from 1982, although it’s not marked as such and I got half-way through before realising. Partly because I’m dense but also because her ideas back then are evergreen. ‌"I also modified violins so they worked like tape instruments. I mounted a tape head on the bridge of the violin, and on the bow, instead of horsehair, there’s a strip of recorded audiotape, so you play that back and forth over the head. That allows you to create sounds that are backwards as well as forwards."
• The view from RSS - a nice look at how a newsletter compiler uses the internet. What I’d love to see is a load of narrated screen recordings from internet people about how they use their computers to do stuff. I’m sure it’d be fascinating.

Watching:

• Ghost Elephants trailer ‌(2:27) - new Herzog documentary klaxon
• Star Wars: Throne Room (ANDOR Special Edition) ‌(3:28) - ‌Mon Mothma addresses the gathered Alliance to properly honor those who gave everything. Then Admiral Ackbar introduces the three guys who showed up last week.
• Simone Giertz: A fruit bowl that mechanically changes size ‌(15:29)

Telly:

• English Teacher - Season two done. Very good. Highly recommended.

It has been 5️⃣ days since a photo of a rabbit was posted to this blog.

Status:

A rest day, though I did try to undertake a few light potterings. They all stalled at the first hurdle, however, resulting in the kind of day that would horrify a productivity guru. Thankfully I am not one of those.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• The Disintegration Loops - dlp 6 - needed a lie down this afternoon and this was perfect. Counting to five, then six, then five…

Reading:

• ‘The cover-up is brazen’: one journalist’s tenacious, traumatic fight to expose Ghislaine Maxwell
• Garbage Day: Waging war for the lulz - What does WW3 look like through the lens of someone who understands trolling?
• Tatjana Wood, award-winning comic book colorist, dies at 99 🪜 - most famously coloured Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run, but also so much more.

Looking:

• Donna Gottschalk and Hélène Giannecchini / Deutsche Börse prize review – images to enrage, bamboozle and deeply move you - The Deutsche Börse photography prize is always worth checking out. Regret not being able to visit it at the Photographers' Gallery like I used to.
• Sophy Rickett’s Pissing Women - I remember this series from back in the day so was delighted when Fi bought the 30th anniversary book. Unlike so much from the 90s it’s dated really well and I particularly appreciated the comments in this piece about the City of London. I worked in bookshops in the City from 2000-2003 and she’s spot on – it’s a very interesting and odd place, ripe for interrogation.

Watching:

• Noah Kalina: This is a distraction ‌(13:25)
• Dog on the Plot: The Magic of the Power Hour ‌(41:11) - test driving a new-to-me gardening channel. Quite chill and informal, liking it so far.
• Americans don’t understand British communication: here’s why ‌(10:35) - interesting stuff about low-context and high-context cultures. I had assumed my difficulty with indirect phrasing (such as “how are you” not meaning they want to know how I am) was an autistic trait. Maybe I’m just culturally low-context. I did consume a lot of American media as a youth…

Telly:

• University Challenge - “Blackberries!”
• The Knick

Status:

Many years ago we had new flooring in the bathroom, which meant the bath panel didn’t fit anymore. Since then we’ve gone from a loose-fitting bath panel which occasionally falls out to no bath panel at all. Last week Roo dropped off some nicer-than-usual wood planks (ie, not pine) and I had an idea to use them to cover the gap.

In olden times I’d bash through a project like this in a day but I’m going to try and spread it out over a few weeks, doing a little bit here and there. Today I did the measurements, figured out how to affix it and placed an eBay order for said fixtures. Sometime this week I’ll start cutting the wood to size. No rush.

Overnight listening:

• If Books Could Kill: Bullshit Jobs - One of those slightly uncomfortable moments when a podcast you enjoy for tearing into overly simplistic management/self-help books does the same to an author you’ve put on your personal pantheon of good guys. But then David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (which I haven’t read yet) is probably not one of his major works, even if it has had the most cultural impact. It’s more a provocation, an attempt to open a dialogue about something we’ve decided to accept as unchangeable. Sort of like Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, another extended essay which serves to get you thinking rather than give you thoroughly evidenced answers. That work comes later.

Music:

• The Drowning Of Lucy Hamilton by Lydia Lunch and Lucy Hamilton - very aware that as much as I admire Lydia Lunch I’m not that familar with her oeuvre. This was not what I expected.

Reading:

• ‘I feel I am not yet grown up’: Alan Bennett’s diary of his 90th year - I really love these snippets of Bennett’s diaries that appear every few years in the press. Their focus on the minutiae of the mundane is so refreshing. Couple of notes: 1) In our 20s and 30s, chum Jez would to ask every few years if I felt grown up yet, presumably because he didn’t. Bennet still doesn’t at 90. 2) Given my condition suddenly disabling my body and mind, at least part of the time, I’ve often thought I need a tutorial in how to adjust to being effectively an old man. I wonder if Bennet’s diaries could be that mentor. “Now and again, I find words hard to come by. […] One’s humanity is temporarily (one hopes) withdrawn. Suspended. It’s a kind of blundering in the head, a cerebral incompetence."

Watching:

• Razor Sharp in Minutes! Chisel Sharpening on a Vevor 1x30 Belt Grinder ‌(18:43)
• Laura Kampf ‌(27:49)

Telly:

• English Teacher
• The Knick

Status:

My old friend Gareth popped over for a catchup today. I was very wary as to whether to go ahead after yesterday but I woke up feeling remarkably OK so decided to risk it, with plenty of opportunities to bail. Managed it all fairly well and despite needing a proper lie down afterwards am not feeling too rough this evening.

It was, of course, lovely to catch up. We met circa 1999 when working at the big Dillons bookstore in Birmingham. That building is now the Apple store. Now there’s a metaphor for the 21st century if you ever needed one.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. - The year civilization collapsed: by Eric H. Cline

Reading:

• The joyful wrath of the skater librarian - by the author of ‌Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides: A History of Badass Women Skateboarders.
• Inside Trans Mission, a night of solidarity and joy for a community under stress. - Dorian Lynskey reports on the “Live Aid for trans rights” concert. Sly of him to note “around the turn of the decade, negative coverage of trans people in the UK press increased exponentially” in the Guardian (which to be fair is much better since they ejected The Observer).
• Quaker Meeting House suffers second Met Police raid - “Quakers have been accustomed to oppression by the state for over 350 years."
• Sam Kriss: You’ll regret it - “There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country… They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them."
• The web is bearable with RSS: And don’t forget “Reader Mode." - Cory Doctorow on how he customises his browser to make reading on the web less unpleasant. I do a lot of this too, but it’s a real arms race. I’d go so far as to say it’s like a game, figuring out how to stop the website from annoying me with increasingly esoteric blocks and tricks. The satisfaction of wrestling a terrible website with great content into submission is real, if not for the faint hearted.
• A death scholar on why we need to stop being naive about dying - “I always hear, ‘Can’t you just put me into a nice meadow and put a sapling on top of me?'” Gould says. “But you will kill that tree. And also, where is this meadow?" Fascinating stuff, but annoyingly doesn’t go into exactly why it’ll kill the tree. (Presumably because the decomposition process doesn’t release nutrition and probably damages the roots. You could probably plant the tree a year or two later.)

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Finishing my homemade log splitter ‌(2:28:21)
• 3.55am in Agadir, Morocco ‌(1:43)

Telly:

• The Knick

Status:

Had my meeting with the chronic fatigue occupational therapist today. It went really well but completely wiped me out. Have spent the rest of the day in a bit of a daze, oscillating between tired and miserable. All together now: it will pass.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Margaret Beaufort - Just listening to people explain the War of the Roses is exhausting. Can’t imagine how tedious it must have been to be alive then, trying to figure out which posh twit had been killed by another posh twit who was now king or whatever. Sheesh.

Reading:

• Mr Smith Goes to Dalston: John Smith on The Girl Chewing Gum at 50 - A fantastic classic piece of film – you can watch it online. I’ll have to seek out his other work now.

Watching:

• Milling 175 floorboards on my homemade bandsaw mill ‌(24:34)

Telly:

• English Teacher
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy