Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Status:

Feeling a little weary today so lowered the pottering quotient.

We ran out of hay for the rabbits and needed to do a run to the horse food shop out in the countryside, which is always fun. Fi was busy and I’m still not driving (don’t trust myself with the fatigue) so my sister did the honours. It’s a journey out of Birmingham so we move through the various iterations of suburbia until suddenly crossing the edge of the city into farms and fields. I had an idea for a photography project once, to visit these “edgelands” where the urban snaps into the rural, and see what I could find. I was also reminded of doing the Trailblazers project in 2016 at a school based on the edge of Birmingham with kids who lived this curious life both of the city and of the countryside. I wonder what happened to those kids? They must be in their mid 20s now.

On returning with two bales and wheeling them to the shed I decided that was enough for today. Not a full rest day but a cautious withdrawing from the fray.

Overnight listening:

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

Music:

• The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - (Thanks Eric)

Reading:

• They built Stepford AI and called it “Agentic” - So much to say about this brilliant piece but I’ll just say the use of the four female characters from Mad Men as archetypes for AI models is pure chef’s kiss. (I’ve always contended Mad Men was a horror show about the original sins of our present time, despite what its creator thinks.)
• Gambling the future into existence - Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends on Substack’s disconcerting move into prediction markets (ie, gambling on the news).
• Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking - Sam Kriss visits the strange young men running the current crop of startups in San Francisco and it’s quite a wild ride. Paul Raven is calling Kris “the Hunter Thompson of his era” which I think I’d agree with. He’s certainly the Hunter Thompson we deserve. (A while after reading I was struck by how I’ve known people like these guys and might even have been one of them when younger - awkward, overly-confident weirdos fabricating ideologies in isolation. It’s probably a stage one needs to go through and grow out of, but I’m not sure rewarding it with millions of investment dollars is a good idea.)
• On Software Quality - Nick Heer does a rundown of the Apple software bugs that are killing his respect for the company with a thousand tiny cuts. I would have a similar list if I could be arsed to maintain it. But he’s also right – we have higher expectations of Apple, and I’m wondering if maybe we should be disappointed when they fail the bar. They are, after all, just a computer company.
• An endless feed of celebrities eating chicken wings - Ryan follows up his “pre-deplatforming” post from last week.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Work continues on the firewood processor EP2 - (Cutting deck build) ‌(2:54:19)

Telly:

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - was quite good. Nothing revolutionary, but maybe that in itself is revolutionary. More of this sort of thing please.
• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Status:

Today’s paced pottering involved a trip to the allotment with my sister to fill up the compost bin. This used to be a 20 minute job of just throwing stuff in but I can’t do that now without exhausting myself so I spread it over a couple of hours while she got on with planting and stuff. It’s really hard to break the habit of just wanted to get on with it but I think I’m getting better at it.

That said, I’m feeling a little worn out this evening. Not too bad and it might just be the fresh air but things feel a bit raw in the old nervous system. Tomorrow will be the telling of it, I guess.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline - I’m going to have to listen to this again in the daytime because his voice is so soporific, which is a good thing for late night listening but not conducive to remembering anything.

Reading:

• How far back in time can you understand English? - A diary entry is written in increasingly older styles of English over a century, followed by an explanation of what’s going on.
• Why so many control rooms were Seafoam Green. - A look at the work of color theorist Faber Birren who figured out that certain colours were easy on the eye and improved mood and concentration. I feel like these shades of green were seen as old fashioned and have been eradicated in workplaces since the 80s. I wonder if that’s had any effect on the people who work there?
• What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm. - Introducing the concept of “agrihoods”, essentially city farms that aim to feed the local population. Interesting concept but I’m very skeptical of the implementation here which feels bit like the “fliplanthropy” plot of The Curse. (See also the allotments link yesterday.)
• Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness? - Lots of noise about this topic over the last months, mostly around autism and ADHD. My take, for what it’s worth, is I had an autism diagnosis in 2018 which didn’t open any doors to support or treatment (so no “burden to the taxpayer” or whatever) but did improve my mental health just by giving me confirmation that I wasn’t stupid and gave me a framework for dealing with when I fucked up. Now I have a chronic fatigue diagnosis that does get me treatment (within the confines of a defunded NHS) my autism diagnosis has helped immeasurably to tailor that treatment in a way that will hopefully get me off benefits and back to work sooner. So yeah, more diagnoses please.
• State of the Operations - Warren Ellis (not the musician) is rethinking his newsletter, which is one of the inspirations for what I’m doing here so I’m paying attention. I think a lot of newsletter evolution can be drawn back to zines (of course I do) and I like this notion of a zine formatted for the inbox.
• The view from the mast-head - Erik Davis is still thinking about Moby Dick, this time in the context of revisiting “the classics” in a time of polycrisis.
• The realities of being a pop star. - Charli XCX has a blog and it’s quite good.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf (29:21)
• Lou Reed Meets the Press (1974) ‌(5:29)

Telly:

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Status:

Prescribed paced pottering continued today, although it does seem to boil down to “do one job but spread it out over the afternoon”. Today’s job was to clean my compostable waste boxes which had built up over the winter. It’s normally a job that takes 10 minutes after doing a compost run. I managed to make it last four hours. No ill effects so far.

Overnight listening:

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

Reading:

• Andor creator Tony Gilroy gives the interview he couldn’t during its release - Disney asked them not to mention fascism for fear of culture war bullshit overshadowing the launch, which is fair enough, and quite sensible if you want to get this stuff in front of people who maybe need to see it.
• Fight The Power: Chuck D on the politics of hip hop - an excerpt from his new book. “Beware when the government says it is in control of culture."
• Remembering Some Guys - “for every fully rationalized system that emerges, expect a corresponding increase in nonsense, horseplay, and mysticism”
• Cemented locks and deflated diggers: the war over privately run allotments - the row over Roots “Allotments” continues. I find it amusing that the march of private equity into the public realm is finding resistance from the humble allotmenteers. You don’t fuck with those people! But more seriously, what Roots and their investors are doing is bad on a fundamental, societal level and should be resisted. I hope this is an eye-opener for those affected and pushes them to resist it in other areas of public life. And they shouldn’t be called allotments unless they’re allotted by the council, managed by a committee of members and based within walking distance of their homes. Ooh, I clearly have an angry essay in me on this…

Telly:

• The Curling - there’s been a few matches in this Olympics where it could have gone either way, right down to the final stone. This men’s final was one of them. Phew! It’s been a fun fortnight but I’m glad I don’t “do” sports. Must be exhausting actually giving a shit all the time.

Status:

After waking at 5am from a typically weird dream (the house was being attacked by a dinosaur/crocodile which I scared off by waving my arms around, which woke up Fiona, though she doesn’t remember it) I slept well enough to try some prescribed pottering today. This is to figure out my baseline of activity with chronic fatigue that won’t trigger a crash. In essence, I do small things with plenty of breaks, making sure I’m not just on the sofa all day but not pushing myself too far.

The main activity was based around a couple of large sacks of flour which needed decanting, then making space to store them a shelf, then tidying up, a job that should take 10 minutes but which I spread over a couple of hours. I also shaved my head because it’s going to be warm for a few days so I shouldn’t get a chill. Along with cleaning out the rabbits that was my activity for the day. If there’s no notable crash tomorrow I’ll try that level again.

On going out to clean the rabbit run tonight I called out “housekeeping!” and I’m astonished I’ve never done that before in the 13+ years we’ve had rabbits.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: John Keats - I usually skip the poetry IOTs because poetry (no offence, poets) but sometimes the life of the poet is more interesting than their work (see Coleridge). This one, not so much. But it did help me get to sleep, which is supposed to be the point of listening with comfort headphones at 1am.

Reading:

• Cory Doctorow: Six Years of Pluralistic - Cory reflects on his massively productive blog, how and why he runs it and what effect it’s had on him. Cory often seems like a blogging superhero, doing an unimaginable amount of reading and writing that seems impossible to replicate, but he breaks it down nicely here and makes it feel doable as a practice. Lots to think about here with regard to what I’m doing with this site.
• Ah shit! We let pedophiles decide our beauty standards. - Jameela Jamil says what has been said many times before but still needs saying again and again. Society needs to stop making straight men feel weird for fancying grown-up women.
• An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia’s most famous painting - more interesting than the headline makes it sound, but also I’d struggle to write a headline for this as it goes all over the place, in a very good way.
• Ian Dunt: Can we extract the Reform nonsense from Labour? - on the proposed changes to achieving settled immigration status. I find this shit infuriating, but then I start with the truism that all people are equal and should be treated as such, not due to accidents of birth and ethnicity. More fool me.
• ‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows
• Research into hedgehog hibernation patters and how they’re being affected by climate change.

Watching:

• The Greek Mythology Family Tree, Explained ‌(14:40) - I know this stuff in bits and pieces from a myriad of comics, movies and stories, so it’s good to have it laid out like this.

Telly:

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Status:

Mostly curling today (it’ll all be over soon) but in-between I did find myself able to focus on some reading, so there’s a couple of nice links below. Mood is better and I feel ready to do some pottering. Sister informs me she has an excess of bokashi juice so we might inoculate some biochar this weekend.

While it’s always a good day to have a member of the royal household arrested it’s worth remembering it’s for being careless with secrets, not for being a sex offender. If you’re after a comparison, consider how Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because he wanted to marry a divorcee, not for being an antisemitic fascist.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: Solving The Mystery of The Collapse - the first couple of these were a bit messy but this one gets right into the meat of things with a wonderful guest, Eric Cline, who I’d love to hear more from. (His book 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed is on Libro.fm so I’ll probably get it next.)

Reading:

• Garbage Day: The only taboo left is copyright infringement - Thought-provoking musings from Ryan Broderick about the nature of “cool” in an environment where all online platforms are corporate-run. He posits that copyright is the only thing they care about so infringing that is the route to notoriety, which is an interesting throwback to the “illegal art” mashup scenes that brought us Negativeland and the Grey Album, because it gets you thrown off the mainstream platforms, which gets you talked about on said platforms. Or something. Like most stuff from Ryan I find it all a bit vertiginous but also fascinating.
• How hipsters gave us Trump - Of course Trump is a symptom of many things, but this is more interesting than you might imagine. As 50s hipsters stole their cultural cachet from black culture, millennial hipsters appropriated white working class motifs because they were (to reference the above) the last taboos in a progressive society, laying the path for MAGA transgressivity. Of specific interest to me is the citing of Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes, big names on the 90s zine scenes who are properly far-right figures. Goad in particular is a touchstone for transgressive work that excited liberals back in the day. Of course there were plenty of edgy weirdos making offensive work who didn’t turn out to be nazis - maybe I should start compiling them.
• How to raise children - I’ve never had to raise a child but I was raised and have done a bit of Uncle-ing in my time. This all rings true.
• Pay or okay - is it really? - A lot of sites are offering the choice between paying for a subscription or accepting tracking cookies. This is a deep dive into what that actually means and if it’s even a choice.

Scheduling:

• SUNN O))) are playing Birmingham, 2nd July at the Institute. I probably won’t go due to the usual fatigue bullshit but I’d love to be able to. I wonder if there’s seating…

Telly:

• The Curling

Status:

Still pretty grumpy today so riding it out by watching the curling, doing jigsaws and listening to calming music. I want to just get on and do stuff but am very aware that if I try in this state it’ll all just go wrong, so best to postpone the pottering for another day.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Mastery: Quantum Sound

Reading:

• Sentiers No. 390 - this used to be my favourite weekly newsletter but Patrick got a bit sidetracked by “AI” in the last year, filling it up with tedious nonsense. Which is fair enough but of no interest to me whatsoever. This week, however is like a blast from the past, full of stuff I want to click on and commentary I value. Long may it continue! And since I hadn’t managed to read much else today please consider it today’s collection of links.

Telly:

• The Curling - Golly! What a day! Also, the Japanese skip looks a heck of a lot like Yasuko Onuki and now I want to listen to Melt-Banana…
• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

This photo of my grandad was always on my mother’s desk. That’s her in the background (presumably with my uncle). I’d guess it was taken early 1950s, a few years before he died.

Status:

It’s the third anniversary of my mum’s death and to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything too adverse. I think about her often, of course, but the weird grief stuff seemed to have passed thanks to some therapy and the fact that a lot of dealing with chronic fatigue and autistic burnout involves “grief work”, so I should be at least ok at this stuff.

So I was a bit narked to find myself mildly grief stricken this morning. And yes, I’m annoyed about it. It seems to come from nowhere with no warning and, most criminally, serves no purpose. And then it goes away leaving me bemused and very aware that there’s another Pete having all the feelings and emotions in a secret part of my head that I have no access to but still have to suffer the consequences of.

It’s probably a good thing my therapy restarts in a few weeks. I know everyone grieves in their own way but I’m pretty sure being pissed off at having emotions and wishing they would just go away so I can get on with the important stuff, whatever that is, isn’t the best way to go about it.

Stupid feelings…

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: Did Homer Write History?

Reading:

• David Hume on Creativity - We should be grateful Hume is not alive today to write about AI.
• This is not an essay about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” - “Why am I supposed to give a fuck what an agonisingly posh woman from London thought Wuthering Heights was about when she was a teenager?" And it just gets better from there. The stuff about the “slippery nature of whiteness” is particularly interesting.

Watching:

• All Your Base is 25 years old - a high(ish)-def recreation of the original flash file.
• Practical Engineering: So You Want to Build a Tunnel… ‌(20:41)

Telly:

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• The Curling

If your rabbit is chewing something you’d rather they didn’t, don’t try and stop them. Simply bolt more wood on.

Status:

Rest day.

Music:

• Mastery: Quantum Sound - cropped up on Night Tracks a while back and the whole album is just out. Bit more info here as to the why’s and wherefore’s but overall it’s perfect brain calming music.

Reading:

• Is this the world’s most eye-popping restaurant? The architectural marvel – in a Leipzig industrial estate - Oscar Niemeyer’s final building. Took me a while to figure out what’s going on in the photo. If you pop Niemeyer Sphere into your image search engine of choice there’s some nice pics of the construction.
• ‘Unintentionally among the queerest releases of its time’: why Calamity Jane is my feelgood movie - one for the wife who loves this movie for reasons I cannot rationalise.
• How men are? The preposterously testosterone-fuelled Taxi Driver turns 50 - “Travis is hateful – as bile-filled as today’s far-right social media warriors… He’s a racist homophobe, a frustrated incel – one of the involuntarily celibate, who rage at the world. You’re reminded of the likes of Nick Fuentes, Charlie Kirk."

Telly:

• The Curling
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Nice bit of winter sun in-amongst the rain today.

Status:

Thought I’d avoided it but the crash eventually came this afternoon. Not the worst but definitely incapacitated so I spent the day watching curling and trying not to let my fight/flight response get agitated by nonsense.

Fuckall links today as I can’t really parse the feeds properly without getting a headache. Should be plenty tomorrow, and there’s always the archives.

Music:

• Happy To See Me by Big Cats - Fi sent me the track Bumbling Shithead Fascists by Guante and Big Cats (spotted on the t-shirt of a young person with interesting hair), which is very nice and on point, but quite different to this album by Big Cats on their own which I was enjoying last night.

Watching:

• Is time real? The physics behind the illusion of time ‌(6:26)
• Laura Kampf ‌(25:32)

Telly:

• Small Prophets - So, so good. A love letter to weird men with no more fucks to give.
• The Curling

The ceiling of Birmingham Town Hall after last night’s gig.

Status:

Rest day. Don’t feel too bad as last night wasn’t too stressful, but my body is definitely aware that I Did A Thing. Crash still might come tomorrow (post-exertion fatigue can take 48 hours to kick in, for some fucking reason) but Monday should be clear. And then I can return to my prescribed pottering.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Ten Benson’s early work, specifically the first two EPs and the debut album with highlights being The Claw and Robot Tourist bringing the feels. After that they went a little cringe but I’m curious to see what the recent stuff is like. Thanks to Sods for the reminder.

Reading:

• { feuilleton } is twenty - I like how John has stayed fairly consistent because he’s doing it for himself, not in service to some perceived audience or expectation. I wish I’d had that discipline, but it turned out my neurons diverge in a less conducive manner. Sidebar: I was actually thinking recently about when I met John at a 90s comic convention where, after stunning Jez and I with some new Lord Horror pages, he recommended a place around the corner for lunch that did whole roast chickens.
• Tracey Emin on reputation, radical honesty – and Reform - not a massive fan of her work (though thinking about it now there’s scope to say it’s in the field of the per-zine, which is in my field of interest) but boy she’s a force of nature and this is a fantastic interview.
• In a blind test, audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud.

Browsing:

• ZineLibrary.org - a collection of over a thousand anarchist zines, ready to print and collate for offline distribution. I’m tempted to run off a bunch of these for when Artefact (our local co-op art space) is back open. Via, and more info.

Watching:

• Lee Miller strokes a phallus ‌(0:48)

Telly:

• Small Prophets
• The Curling

…but unfortunately I have chronic fatigue so I can’t.

Status:

Just back from seeing Bridget Christie’s show at Birmingham Town Hall. My first trip to a gig in what must be years now. Took a fair bit of planning and judicious use of ear plugs (were stand-up gigs always this loud?) but we did it! I’m sure the next couple of days will be quite trying but I think it was worth it to take my wife out for her birthday. And of course Bridget was marvellous. If I do crash it’ll mostly be from laughing too much.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Code of Hammurabi

Reading:

• The Banality Machine - another good “AI” takedown for the files.
• How “hedgehog tanks” are forcing Russia and Ukraine to rewrite drone warfare - I don’t like war-tech stuff because it can become a bit pornographic, but there’s something about the workshops and iterations here that interests me. While I’m sure soldiers always adapted their kit on the fly this feels on another level.
• How one hidden-away decision defines the future of the Starmer government - Ian Dunt explains what a cabinet secretary is and why they’ve become less effective of late.
• Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why - I have vivid moments throughout my adult life when I learned things that clearly should have been part of my state education. Often they were in disciplines that had been denigrated as “Mickey Mouse” or not relevant to the job market. Media studies was the big one as it seemed to decode all manner of controlling bullshit so of course the Murdochs were against it, but of course gender and race studies are also a threat and so must be shut down.
• Richard Littler watches Forbidden Planet (1956) and notices all manner of things that later appeared in Star Wars and other movies.
• We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps - Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis making sensible points.

Watching:

• Kermode reviews “Wuthering Heights” ‌(13:15) - I think the most interesting thing about Emerald Fennell career is she’s essentially a B-movie shlock director but for whatever reason gets held up as proper art-house making serious deep work. I’m sure this will be an enjoyable nonsense, and I’m happy for everyone involved, but I’m not expecting much more.

Telly:

• The Curling - After moaning about the unskippable ads on Discovery+ I’m happy to say I’ve been watching on my laptop rather than the tellybox and have seen no adverts over two matches today. (The lead commentator remains a 4th rate Ken Bruce clone but he’s not much worse than Steve Cram to be fair.)

Status:

A rest day in prep for the theatre tomorrow. Finally accepted I want to watch more curling than the BBC are able to show and paid £3.99 for full coverage on Discovery+. Was then disappointed to discover this includes unskippable adverts but it did seem too good to be true. I’ve pretty much eliminated my exposure to advertising so it’s a bit of a shock to have this attention seeking bullshit parachute into my carefully constructed context. Still it’s only for a week and Fi can watch as much exciting stuff as she wants now.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: The Fall of Troy

Reading:

• Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong
• The quirky geology behind Olympic curling stones
• ‘People like cheap energy’: the bagel shop saving money and emissions with plug-in batteries - I’m intrigued by plug-in batteries but whenever a YouTuber I follow has a sponsored slot for them they’re around a couple of grand, so not great for home use. Could see this working for the bakery though.

Telly:

• Small Prophets
• The Curling

Still failing to photograph this brick. What is this shit?

Status:

Rest day today. Had a headache for most of it and napped late-afternoon. Probably over did the pottering a bit yesterday, so that’s a data point: potter slightly less.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Jeffrey Epstein was a paedophile, and we all live in his world - a must read from Carole Cadwalladr, reflecting on when she was sent to do travel writing from St Tropez 20 years ago and got talking to renowned photographer of naked children David Hamilton who knew all the right people. The crimes of the rich and powerful are always happening in plain sight.
• Alistair Carns: Labour’s ex-marine who ‘would be a nightmare’ for the Tories - Utterly bemused by these stories about my MP, presumably being planted in the press. Nobody knows what he believes in or where he sits on the political spectrum and he seems to spend half his time “adventuring” up mountains and in the arctic. Can only assume he’s being primed as the sacrificial starting gun for a leadership challenge.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Building a firewood processing line from scraps - EP1 (Log & Roller Deck build) ‌(1:54:35)

Telly:

• Small Prophets
• The Curling

Something about photographing this brick has stretched my stupid phone past it limits - this is not how I wanted the photo to turn out. Need to get the Nikon out there.

Status:

Paced pottering continues. I wanted to tidy up the middle room today and managed to get it to an adequate state by doing a little bit at a time. Even got the vacuum out for a rug, though I felt it afterwards so might not do that again. A double victory as I’m very aware the bulk of the housework falls on Fiona these days so if I can do a bit more than before it’s a massive help.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: The Bronze Age Apocalypse ep 1 - I seem to have developed a soft spot for pre-Iron Age history, probably thanks to that massive Dave Graeber book, so this was fun. Everything you think is unique to “western civilisation” was already done 3000+ years ago. (Also, cool note about the Near East (western Med) being supplied by Cornish tin).

Reading:

• Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends: Who’s that baby? - It’s long been said that the internet is a mirror. It follows these “AI” nonsenses are also a mirror, maybe a hall of them.
• Anora’s American Dream - I like the bit where the audience was happily laughing along and then suddenly fall silent. I found Anora to be a very discomforting watch, totally worth five stars.
• “Flying” electric boats could remake urban transport 🪜 - Hydrofoils are back, baby!
• Out of the red, but at what cost? Birmingham council asset sales have left city reeling, say residents - No longer financially bankrupt (if it ever really was) but still morally bankrupt. The mismanagement of my city over the last couple of decades has been a neoliberal disaster.

Watching:

• What if you made a jetpack using rifles? ‌(4:37)

Telly:

• The Curling
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• The Residence - Excellent and highly recommended. I love how they started with a non-fiction book about how the White House works behind the scenes and built a proper whodunnit on top. Uzo Aduba is a revelation and my new favourite kooky detective. Naturally, Netflix have cancelled it.

Status:

Experimenting with what I guess we’re calling paced pottering, doing little things for short periods of time and taking plenty of breaks. I may have over-pottered a couple of times today but mostly it’s been OK and I’ve ticked off a couple of things I wanted to get done.

The main goal for this week is to make it to the Town Hall on Friday to see Bridget Christie for Fi’s birthday. No boom-bust, no burn-out, no crashes allowed before then.

Overnight listening:

• Agartha by Wata Igarashi

Reading:

• Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30 - never read it, probably never will, but I like that it exists and enjoy reading about it.
• Martin Rowson: I asked AI to name my wife. To the hopelessly incorrect people it cited, my deepest apologies - one of the most infuriating things about modern online information services is their inability to say they don’t have the answer.
• We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher - Mark “Capitalist Realism” Fisher is, of course, really interesting and one of the big thinkers of our era (for better or worse) so I’m intrigued by a film about him. But the milieu, if you like, that Fisher and people who like Fisher swim in has a tendency to be front-loaded with theory and jargon (for better or worse) so I’m also very wary of a film about him. Especially one which proudly claims to have been made on Instagram, whatever the fuck that means. Expecting this to be a love-hate watch.
• This whistle fights fascists

Looking:

• Travis Chapman’s art, specifically Hippo, fart, milk battle, crème brûlée harvest capybara raccoon cows
• The Summoning of Bertrand Russell

Watching:

• Noah Kalina ‌(17:37)
• Woodturning - 1826 Antique Bowling Ball ‌(17:35)

Telly:

• The Curling
• The Residence

Status:

Rough sleep last night and a bit grumpy today. Can’t settle or focus. Feeling like this is the crash from Friday so hopefully it’ll blow itself out.

Wally decided today would be a good day to develop a gut issue and stop eating. We don’t like to panic as it sometimes resolves itself but by mid afternoon he was still off and clearly in some discomfort so it was syringe time. A spot of metacam for the pain, half a teeny tablet of motility medication to get things moving and a bunch of recovery food (powered grass diluted into mush basically) to push things along. Within a few hours he was back to normal.

I sometimes wonder, after doing all this, if the rabbit might have recovered anyway. It’s not worth the risk, of course, especially on a Sunday when the vets are closed (which is when they always decide to shut down). Worst case scenario we just wasted some meds.

I refer to this as kick-starting the rabbit.

Overnight listening:

• If Books Could Kill - The Millionaire Next Door - arguably the origin of the belief that super-rich people have earned the right to be super-rich

Reading:

• Jeff Bezos, Moral Cretin - notable for the concept of team billionaire. “Team Billionaire thinks that billionaires are brilliant, wise, and omnicompetent.. thinks the public needs to stay in line and respect their betters… thinks the government should stay on the sidelines (at least until its bailout time, that is).”
• You can just dig a hole: Some thoughts on trench composting and effort. - I’ve never given trench composting much thought because, well, who has that much space? And also, so much digging! But I hadn’t really considered that they can be reused and can get more efficient over time as the soil ecology gets used to the inputs. More research needed.

Watching:

• 160 year old Victorian door frames restoration ‌(34:18)
• Laura Kampf (27:11)

Telly:

• The Curling
• The Residence

Nope, not going out in that weather mate.

Status:

Bit of a rest day today. Weather still shite but there’s curling on the tellybox.

The ash10.com domain is expiring soon and I’m in two minds as to renewing it. It’s not in use for anything but I have a soft spot for it. Clearly it’s a play on my surname but it also has some rather nerdy history.

About 25 years ago the assistant editor job was advertised at the weekly comic 2000AD. Some friends suggested I go for it so, despite having no experience in publishing outside of zines, I applied. To my surprise I got an interview though they did immediately say it was because mine was the weirdest application. Obviously I didn’t get the job and went on with my life.

But there’s a tradition at 2000AD that the editorial staff are robots with their real names turned into alphanumeric codes - Alan Grant became AALN-1, for example. So in the unlikely event that I got this job I was going to need a robot name. ASH-10 it was.

And so, as was the fashion, I looked up ASH10 as a domain name and saw it was available. Five letters on a dot-com was pretty rare so I snapped it up. The thing is I’ve never found an actual use for it. It’s not like I don’t have a history of impulse-buying domains – who in my world doesn’t? But this one feels wrong to let go. Surely I can make use of my robot alter-ego for something?

I have until April to decide.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads as gangsta rap album
• Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters - the Guardian finally notices what has been blindingly obvious for years now.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Pouring the pad and making a ramp - work shop build EP2 ‌(2:08:50)
• You Could Call it a Scene: A slice of West Midlands alternative music in 2015 ‌(1:28:31) - funny, if this was made just a few years earlier I’d probably know everyone, but I know none of these people or bands - my eye was elsewhere. I wonder if someone’s recording whatever’s going on right now?
• Torbjörn Åhman Blacksmithing - Making a sleigh bell ‌(19:35) - my favourite thing about Torbjörn’s videos is how he spends the first half making the tools before making the thing. I always forget this and am scratching my head as to what the hell he’s doing.

Telly:

• The Curling

The weather continues to be awful, as is the way of February. This was taken a week or so back.

Status:

Had my second session with the occupational therapist from the chronic fatigue centre today. The first one was a bit heavy with lots of questions from me and some big decisions to make. This time the decisions had been made and I didn’t have that many questions, so we could dig into what’s actually going to help.

One of the techniques that we covered in the group sessions last year was keeping an activity diary and coding according to exertion. I’ve found this hard because the same activity can have radically different outcomes depending on context. Sometimes a conversation can be relaxing and restoring, sometimes it can leave me in recovery for a couple of days. The problem, as is so often the case, is I’m overthinking it. So we’re not going to do that.

We’re going to try something called Sensory Ladders which is a toolset used with autistic kids. She’s going to talk me through it in the next session, so I don’t have to worry about it just yet, but it’ll be fun if great-nephew M is also doing them.

It was interesting that she asked if I was OK with the phrase “people with autism” or would prefer something else, which is something I’d not considered. I know people can get quite specific about how they want their autism described but frankly having transitioned from “fuckheaded weirdo” I’m happy with whatever. (They’ve had an increase in autistic people referred to the centre so she’s been on some training sessions.)

Anyway, the main outcome was instructions to “potter around” for the next four weeks. Not to do nothing – that could be counter productive – but to do small things that make me happy. Keep the stress low, keep the energy low, and find that baseline. Medical instructions to potter from a medical professional. Nice.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Henry IV Part 1 - just the right level of hold my attention to send me off to sleep.

Reading:

• Ian Dunt: Starmer’s moment of reckoning - what a week, eh?
• Foundational Texts: Jenny Holzer’s Truisms - I wasn’t as sold as Dan Sinker on Holzer’s work when I saw it the first time, but I think I might appreciate it much more now. I do like how she started just pasting them up on the street.
• Why science fiction can’t predict the future (and why that’s a good thing) - I’m always surprised when people think sci-fi is about the future. It’s set in the future, sure, but it’s totally about the now.

Watching:

• Kermode review The Chronology of Water ‌(5:25) - this looks so good.
• Primitive Technology: Portable pulley blower ‌(14:55)

Telly:

• A Thousand Blows
• The Residence
• The Curling - devastated that Eve Muirhead and her piercing blue eyes have retired.

Status:

A friend came over for an overdue catch-up which was lovely. Afterwards I had a mini crash and slept for a bit longer than I was intending. Probably due to shit sleep last night rather than their company, though one never can tell.

Very few links today. Suddenly it was 10pm and I’d read fuckall. Some days are like that. Check out the archives if you’re in need. Monday was a good day, iirc.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: Blue Labour - mostly about Maurice Glasman who comes across as an utter wanker with few redeeming qualities. Bonus Steve Bannon appearance too, with whom he has regular chats. Bannon collects left-leaning bigots with grievances so this isn’t a big surprise.

Music:

• Agartha by Wata Igarashi - the track Mineral came up on Night Tracks and did weird but good things to my brain so I immediately looked up more by this Japanese ambient techno dude. This album is his take on 70s German cosmiche which helped me settle into my nap today.

Reading:

• The mountain that weighed the Earth

Watching:

• What happens if a rain water tank freezes? ‌(6:10)

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Status:

Nothing to report today, which is OK!

Overnight listening:

• Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity by Robin Ince - Finished this last night. Starts a bit all over the place (apt given it’s about ADHD) but quickly gains focus and, thanks to his interviewing lots of very different people, turned out to be a very useful overview of what it’s like to be a neurodiv. Will be recommending this to people.

Reading:

• We’ve moved from ‘water crisis’ to ‘water bankruptcy’ - I read about the perils of pumping excessive water from deep aquifers in Jay Owen’s book Dust and it really is a last resort as they can take hundreds of years to refill. Once they’re done, they’re effectively done.
• If Reform ever wins power in Westminster, it will be because of Labour’s cowardice - George Monbiot advocating for proportional representation.
• Hay stocks are running low – this is the long tail of last year’s drought - confirmation of what we suspected. Yields were down 60% last year and prices have doubled. Thankfully our rabbits don’t need much but I suspect we’re going to have to be much less liberal in our usage.

Watching:

• Why this Manchester byelection is a lesson in 21st century politics ‌(13:48) - John Harris' Anywhere but Westminster goes to Gorton. One of the more depressing things I’ve seen recently.

Telly:

• The Residence
• The Muppet Show - not bad and on reflection the Muppet Show was always a bit ropey (with flashes of genius) so this was about right. Hope they do a proper series.
• Fallout

Fi and the buns. “I look like my dad” says she. Happens to us all.

Status:

Relatively do-nothing day. Bit of tinnitus all day but nothing too bad. My meeting with the CFS occupational therapist has been brought forward to Friday so I guess I’d better start preparing for that.

Had a no-worries-if-you-can’t question about composting for the new co-op housing development in Stirchley which I was happy to bash out a few sentences for. It’s funny how this doesn’t seem to trigger my fatigue as much as other tasks, probably because it’s all in my head already and doesn’t need any processing. And it’s always nice to have an excuse to share the Dragon on the roof case study with its wonderful Hunt Emerson cartoons.

Overnight listening:

• Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity by Robin Ince

Music:

• Night Tracks - Hannah Peel is back on presenting duties this week - hooray! No shade on Sara Mohr-Pietsch (who clearly has the cooler name, let’s be fair) but Hannah’s voice is so perfectly soothing for what I need.

Reading:

• Margaret Calvert - the sign-making design genius who kept Britain’s drivers (and ducks) safe - I hadn’t clocked that the gov.uk website uses the same typeface as UK road signs. No wonder it feels so reassuring.
• Garbage Day: Here’s how Epstein broke the internet - I don’t think anyone needs to hear more minutia about Epstein’s sordid life but Ryan has pieced together some fascinating threads about the far-right internet and explaining his involvement with Steve Bannon. Not a surprise to see Aleksandr Dugin pop up too (cf). Like many things in this current age it’s probably best explained as pathetic men with dumb ideas having access to excessive power and money.
• The other Turing test - Alan Turning’s chemical castration medication which led to his suicide was also used to “treat” unwed mothers undergoing forced adoption leading to all manner of unintended consequences. The past was a horrible place and certain types of people keep wanting to take us back there.
• Wild parakeets in the UK: exotic delights or a potential problem? - a nicely comprehensive article by the Natural History Museum that clears up some questions I had. There are a few ring-necked parakeets around here but not enough to trouble the crows and pigeons yet.

Watching:

• HIDARI (Pilot Film) - The Stop-Motion Samurai Film ‌(5:32) - I love how the weapons are all woodworking tools and the blood is sawdust. (If you get a shit AI dub, that’s YouTube being arseholes. Select the Japanese track and put on subs, like god intended.)
• How do retention ponds actually work? ‌(17:42) - Grady explains with a model he built in his garage.
• Tour of Gerald’s greenhouse ‌(2:11)

Telly:

• The Residence

Status:

Lucy came over this afternoon and we took all the compostables to the allotment. This included a drop-off from another rabbit-caring friend who saves up their poop and pissy hay for us, so we actually have a glut at the moment.

As usual I had to restrain myself from doing the actual physical work which is so hard as I really want to get stuck in. I think I did fairly well, managing a bit of light sorting while Lucy did the lugging around.

Everything is so damp right now. On the one hand it feels dead because nothing is sprouting, but on the other there’s so much luminous green growing on all the surfaces. I took some phone snaps but should really take the Nikon up there before it all dries out in the spring.

Overnight listening:

• Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity by Robin Ince

Reading:

• Two terrible children on a windy hill: a rereading of Wuthering Heights - “What has struck me, reading Wuthering Heights for the first time, is how little of what is held in the cultural memory actually exists in the book." Friends of mine recently watched The Graduate and expressed similar confusion as to how it didn’t match the “cultural memory”. Fascinating how the zeitgeist edits art to fit it, rather than the other way around.
• An internet of checkpoints - a lovely article by Bijan Setphen on the sanctuary offered by internet comments, something that has intrigued me since my blog was colonised by a emergent community that had nothing to do with me back in the early 2000s.
• ME and Long Covid have brought my children’s lives to a standstill - it’s reassuring to see the BBC publishing stuff like this as it’s easy for folk in my situation to completely fall off the radar. Ends with a quote from the government claiming significant investment in Decode ME, which could be promising, and cites their ME/CFS delivery plan from last summer which I guess I should have a look at when I have the energy.
• Life on Peptides Feels Amazing 🪜 - I have no interest in injecting grey-market wellness supplements and this whole story is kinda terrifying, but I have to admit, the idea of a simple injection to tell my body to stop being tired all the time is…
• The End of Analogue: Elizabeth Goodspeed on the limits of imperfection as a design strategy - lots of fun observations about the value placed on analogue processes in a pretty much digital world. (I’ve been thinking about toying with analogue photographic processes but then I remembered I hated all that nonsense and felt liberated by digital cameras, even if a lot of my subsequent work was faux-analogue looking. Complex shit!)
• Noah Kalina’s newsletter and then clicking through his new photo archive.
• Hobbes vs Anarchism

Watching:

• Noah Kalina: What do chickens do in the cold? ‌(13:06) - Noah’s feelings about chickens mirror mine about rabbits. I’ve often thought they’re of a similar vibe.

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Status:

Relatively quiet day. Slept a lot and tried to take things easy. Great-neph M came over and we spent a bit of time together. He’s just got his formal autism diagnosis which should unlock a whole load of support at school and we talked about the difference that external validation makes. I don’t get to hang out with M as much as I’d like but it’s good to be his adult autism buddy. He’s currently fascinated by old phones (and most old tech to be fair) and was delighted that I never throw anything away so have a box of the damn things. Top Uncling.

Overnight listening:

• Mozart’s Requiem in D minor

Reading:

• John Harris: In Gorton and Denton, I found a long-festering sense of fury that Labour has no idea how to tackle
• The Fallen Apple - it would be nice if companies, once they figure out how to make something useful that people want, could just keep doing that and not fuck it up for the short-term benefit of the stock market or whatever. For the first time in 40 years my next computer (which I will put off as long as possible) might not be a Mac and I really resent the hassle that’s going to entail.
• America’s contract to protect white women has always been tenuous

Watching:

• Beau Travail - When a woman makes a movie about men ‌(23:52) - really good video essay about the portrayal of masculinity in film that unexpectedly turns polemic towards the end.
• Laura Kampf ‌(23:04)
• Sunday Papers: The Observer 18 January 2026 (1:04) - Isobel Smith, an interesting artist Fiona came across.

Telly:

• The Residence
• A Thousand Blows

Status:

Recovery day again, mostly spent reading Elizabeth Sandifer’s huge chapter on Alan Moore’s From Hell which dropped last night (35,000 words - estimated reading time: 192–244 minutes), part of her insanely long series about the UK comics scene framed by the work of Moore and Grant Morrison. It’s the kind of epic fan work that fascinates me (see also Tom Ewing’s monstrous recounting of 2000AD and Douglas Wolk’s All Of The Marvels, to name two others that spring to mind) for its attempt to contain everything in the hope that some sense might emerge from the telling.

I don’t know if there are similar styles of long form writing in academia-proper. I have a sense that academics start with a theory and then bring in texts to argue for and against it. This type of writing feels closer to the travelogue where the writers is walking a marked path, a road trip to “find the real America”, an attempt to decode the meaning of the mountain by climbing it. The path, America, the mountain, is fixed - the work is the work. All we can do is experience and explore the minutiae.

(Sidebar: yes, Sadifer does mention the Koch Snowflake. No, I’m not sure she see’s the application to her own work.)

Anyway, I’m more a casual reader Sandifer’s work in general and tend to skim read a lot, but the fractured publication of From Hell occurs alongside significant parts of my comics education, from those early issues of Taboo blowing my teenage mind in 1989 through to my selling the first collected edition through my small press distro in 1999. I have a personal stake in this particular narrative and thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it, along with the bits of back story I didn’t already know.

Could it be edited down to a manageable length, comprehendible by casual readers? Certainly. But there’s something to be said for editing up, for including everything and letting the narrative emerge on its own, even if it’s not something I would recommend any of you read.

Overnight listening:

• Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity by Robin Ince - the chapter on relationships rang a few too many bells…

Reading:

• Chapter Three: The Ordering and Reordering of Data (From Hell) - as described above, I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’ve spend a fair bit of time reading and thinking about Alan Moore’s From Hell.

Watching:

• SCTV High Q Night School sketch ‌(7:29) - RIP Catherine O’Hara
• You are being misled about renewable energy technology. ‌(1:32:00) - I have lots to say about this subject but it will have to wait for another day.
• Pöpcørn with The Swedish Chef ‌(3:38) - I strongly recommend you switch on the captions.

Telly:

• Amadeus - I genuinely don’t know if this was worth it. Great performances and I’ll watch Will Sharpe in anything, but why was it made? Remaking a bonafide classic needs to be done for reason, to say something new about the current moment. I don’t think anything new was said here, and certainly nothing about the now. File under “content” I guess.

Status:

Recovery day. I suppose the goal now is for there to be no more recovery days, once I find my activity baseline. Can’t say I’ll miss them.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Roman Arena

Music:

• Been listening to a lot of Gillian Welch today. Amused to see her described as “Americana” which I guess is country-for-cool-people. (Yes, I know it’s a whole different thing…)

Reading:

• Garbage Day: We’re joining the general strike
• Mackenzie Crook on comedy, cruelty and being TV royalty - nice to see him looking back on the cruelty of The Office with horror. He’s very much occupying a not-Gervais space.
• Collecting a whole deck of cards (by finding them on the street)
• Matt Goodwin and the end of England
• Kristen Stewart on her audacious feature directing debut

Watching:

• Simone Giertz - This lamp changes every time you look at it ‌(16:45) - on a recovery day when you’re feeling a little low there’s nothing better than a new Simone video.
• Ants Pants - Big work shop build ep1 - New concrete pad ‌(2:01:44)

Telly:

• Amadeus