Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

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

Status:

Steady day today, trying to keep off the sofa while not overdoing it. My long term goal is to be on other chairs. Currently writing this on the sofa. Hmm.

Overnight listening:

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

Reading:

• Gordon Parks’ era-defining shots of segregation – and those who defied it - I first came across Gordon Parks when a housemate was watching the documentary Half Past Autumn which left us gasping at his wide ranging achievements. By the time he directed a ballet we were on the floor. But he started as a photographer and his photographs are fantastic.
• The window chrome of our discontent - More righteous Apple design moaning.
• The mysteries of Dorothy Vallens: On Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet

Watching:

• Rusty camping stove restoration ‌(10:42)
• Harmony Korine: America’s most misunderstood filmmaker ‌(1:07:18) - The deep dive into Korine’s work I didn’t realise I needed. Confess I haven’t seen much of his work but I’ve always liked that it exists.

Telly:

• The Knick

Status:

Friend Roo came over today for a chat and a catch-up. Talked about making creative work in a manageable way and how I might learn to do things differently. Came away with some good ideas which I’m going to try and try out.

Somewhat related to this, I found myself thinking about hypertext novels which were a thing about 25 years ago – I remember Geoff Ryman’s 253 being pretty interesting (you can read the original website here) – but nothing really came of them. The closest legacy I can think of is going on a Wikipedia binge where you follow links and wind up reading about things you’d never have deliberately looked up. There’s an effectively infinite number of ways to connect all the pages on Wikipedia yet all of those connections can create a logical narrative.

There’s also the concept of the Memex, which came up in that HyperCard video. And the more contemporary idea of the Digital Garden. Apps like Obsidian work in this way and while they’re marketed as knowledge banks I’m kinda interested in how they could be used for something more… interesting.

Overnight listening:

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

Reading:

• The Chronology of Water - review

Looking:

• Laboratory of Lust: the disturbing genius of erotica pioneer Félicien Rops - his painting, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, is quite astonishing and I’m mildly obsessed with the woman walking her pig. Plenty more of his work on Wikipedia.
• Horizons and highways: Franco Fontana’s stunning photographic experiments - reminded me of a few things I’ve tried in the past (none of which look this good, of course, but we can dream).

Watching:

• David Wengrow: The History of Human Civilization ‌(2:00:32) - a long two hour interview with the co-author of The Dawn of Everything which I thoroughly enjoyed and got a lot out of. If you’re pushed for time the section from 15 to 37 minutes on the Indigenous enlightenment is the meat of the thing and why I think these ideas are vital to how we see ourselves as humans. But the whole thing is great. See also Paul Raven’s extensive notes. I like his appraisal of Wengrow: “Measured and thoughtful he may be, but he’s also quietly confident—the air of someone who has done the reading, had the arguments, and refined his position carefully. An academic of the old school, one is tempted to say.”
• Ants Pants: Building a 20ton log splitter ‌(2:08:23)

Telly:

• University Challenge
• English Teacher

Status:

Went for a walk in the park. An actual walk, not on the scooter. Effectively a tour of the benches in the park, of which there are thankfully a decent number. Made it to the allotment and had a sit.

Need to record that today was pretty heavy on the ennui and sadness re: the chronic fatigue. This will pass, and it was less heavy than it’s been. But even so.

Feel like something needs to change in how I’m doing days. This may also pass but I’m marking it in case it doesn’t.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. - The year civilization collapsed: by Eric H. Cline - have reached the bit about the Hittite king Suppiluliuma and while all the names from this period are a bit odd to modern ears, listening to a historian eruditely say “Suppiluliuma” over and over is quite something.

Music:

• Bill Callahan: My Days of 58 - new album klaxon! It’s very good, as expected, and feels like a bit of departure from recent albums, more introspective and self-referential, if that’s possible.

Reading:

• The death of Spotify: Why streaming is minutes away from being obsolete - I feel like ever since Spotify launched I’ve been reading articles about what it all means (though that might be because my friend Craig spent a while studying it) but this one is kinda interesting, despite opening with a cringe anecdote. Like most things it’s about who has the power and control.
• Ten years of Cold War Steve
• Matt Haughey: Random bits and bobs
• An expat in Dubai has a startling revelation - Stephen Collins knocks it out of the park.
• ‘Cultural monstrosities!’ The thrilling visual legacy of punk and post-punk

Watching:

• Tick Stick: The carpentry tool that does the impossible ‌(13:06)
• Practical Engineering: Earthquake-Proof Foundations ‌(18:03)
• What if you floated upwards 1 ft every second? ‌(2:52)
• HyperCard changed everything ‌(11:02)

Telly:

• English Teacher

Status:

The sun is out and all my friends are going on about how the sun is out with big smiles on their faces (or big smiley emojis, because let’s face it I don’t see people in person much these days). I’m happy for them but can’t share their unbridled enthusiasm. Sure, it’s nice to be outside when it’s warm and not-wet, and as someone who gets up late I’m looking forward to lighter evenings, but I’ve never been one of those people that gets SAD. I’m this grumpy all year round.

I think today would normally have been a crash day as it had some of the signs. But it wasn’t a crash day. I can cautiously say I’m flattening the curve (to coin a phrase) on my boom and bust cycle.

I’m mildly obsessing over how annoyed I was with the first two episodes of Paradise, so much so I’m tempted to watch it out of spite. Hopefully I’ll get over this soon.

Overnight listening:

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

Reading:

• Catherine Opie and her astonishing photographs of queer America. - that photo of Diana Nyad is amazing.
• 25 years of iPod brain - I could (and maybe should) write a short book about how mp3s changed how I engaged with music over the 2000s, and how that suddenly stoped with effects I’m not too happy about.
• Why attack Iran? - “Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis."
• The last idiot who earnestly believes in the American Experiment. (via) and Learn With Ms Rachel review – undoubtedly the TV event of the year for millions of us - both of these address something I’ve been pondering today. Why do we teach kids a very specific distinction of right and wrong and then, as they turn into adults, do everything we can to dissuade them of this?
• Intelligent Life of Earth - “The more something is repeated, the more true it is. It’s why propaganda is so successful."

Clearing the tabs

I’ve had these open in my browser for over a week but haven’t had the capacity to digest them properly for posting above, so I’m declaring bankruptcy and posting them un-read. Having skimmed the intros I’m pretty sure they’re worth reading, but even so, click at your own risk.

• A.I. Isn’t People - How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?
• How did we end up threatening our kids’ lives with AI? and Taking action against AI harms by Anil Dash
• “In 2016, there was no way any of us could have charged for a link round-up.” - Delia Cai, writer of Deez Links
• What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
• Will Fungi Thwart the Destructive Rise of the Anthropocene?
• The Kingdom of Misfits
• What does it mean to make something?
• New Ferality - Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
• Centrist imaginations - on Bari Weiss and The Free Press
• Fifty Years Ago, Kraftwerk Talked Tape, Paranoia and the Human Machine
• Another London, by Hari Kunzru - Excavating the disenchanted city
• Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?
• The Slow Death of the Power User
• What is a token - AI is meant to seem like magic. But there’s no such thing as magic. It’s all illusion. So, allow me to spoil that illusion for you.
• Actually, the left is winning the AI debate

Watching:

• Noah Kalina: Holes in the Archive ‌(20:57) - talking about the Farm Security Administration photo archive.
• GERALD YOUTUBE VIDEO ‌(19:45) - Twenty minutes of Gerald potting on his seedlings.

Telly:

• English Teacher
• The Knick

Status:

Rest day, mostly. Slept long and did some light pottering around the house. Feeling OK.

Family member is having a clear-out and asked me to sell a bunch of their books on one of those “scan them and we pick them up” services. Only a third of them were accepted and that box came to £20, about £2 per kilo. Every little counts but it really feels like books have no value outside of collector markets. I can’t be too upset – I very rarely buy physical books these days unless I want to support the author. Reading in medium where I can change the font and type size is much more preferable. At the same time I’m getting interested in print and physical publications as alternatives to an increasingly flakey and fractured internet, so there’s an interesting tension there.

Overnight listening:

• Lifepod: Pirate Care, with Valeria Graziano & Tomislav Medak - quite an intense conversation about some deep topics, maybe too much for a 1am listen so I’m glad to see there’s a transcript. Related links: Pirate Care website, book and their previous project the Memory of the World shadow library.

Reading:

• John Harris: Labour is stubborn in defeat because it knows this: we face the belated end of the political 20th century. - It’s interesting that Labour’s best hope seems to be some combination of Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan. Almost as if the mayoral system is producing politicians who known how to govern while Westminster just isn’t fit for purpose.
• Zürich turned its rooftops into a climate shield. - “We must again live in houses where nature is above us, for it is our duty to put nature, which we destroy by building the house, back on the roof. The nature we have on the roof is this piece of earth that we killed by putting the house there."

Watching:

• Laura Kampf: The perfect lamp ‌(28:20)

Telly:

• English Teacher
• The Knick - The medical historical show from a decade back, directed, shot and edited by Soderbergh, and brought to my attention by this CinemaStix video.

Status:

My oldest contiguous friend Jez came over to visit today. While we’re always in touch I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and it was really lovely. Probably spent too long chatting (90 minutes is way over my limit for conversations) but fuck it, eh?

Definitely needed a nap afterwards, which was broken by whoever does the BBC’s Mindful Mix programming Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 an hour in. Brief Encounter angst is certainly a wake up call.

Overnight listening:

• Lifepod: An introduction to Lifepod - Adam setting out his stall and reading a section of the book. Looking forward to the first proper episode tonight.

Music:

• Ministry Trax! Box - Ninety early tracks by Ministry including side projects Revolting Cocks, Pailhead, 1000 Homo DJs, PTP and Acid Horse. I remember some of these bleeding into my consciousness as a curious youth via the goths in my circles. Amusingly that 1000 Homo DJs version of Supernaut was my first exposure to Sabbath - it was years before I heard the original.

Reading:

• Timothy Snyder: Fascist failure - Positing that Trump is actually shite at doing fascism properly, not that this leaves us in a better place.
• Laurie Penny: Temporarily embarrassed sex criminals - Useful reminder that “patriarchy” doesn’t mean rule by men, it means rule by the father, the patriarch.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Finishing the Roller Deck & moving it out of the workshop ‌(2:48:33)
• Nerdwriter: What’s jazz doing in A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms? ‌(10:14)

Telly:

• English Teacher
• Paradise - OK, this is utter bobbins. Barely made it through the second episode. Avoid, avoid.

Yes, rabbits literally shit where they eat. They’re little poop production lines.

Status:

Grumpy Pete has left the building for now. Having a rest day to be sure. Did laundry, finished off setting up the online shopping, had a nap.

A lot of the links I post here are about the rising fascist threat and what we can do to protect ourselves from it (see Lifepod below, for example) so it would be churlish not to mention today’s by-election victory by the Greens, bloodying the nose of Reform and giving Labour a much needed reality check. The Greens are not perfect by any stretch but they’re clearly on the right side of the fight.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Columbian Exchange - Being the exchange of foodstuffs and germs when Europeans and Americans first met. Quickly reframed as “less an exchange, more a massacre” and has some interesting stuff about climate change from population loss and the changes in European diets fuelling the Industrial Revolution. Reminded me of a bit in The Dawn Of Everything that Rousseau’s enlightenment ideas were influenced by indigenous practices encountered by settlers, specifically the Wendat chief Kondiaronk, which was sadly not mentioned.

Reading:

• Weird Pride in a hostile world. - It seems Weird Pride Day is 4th March. This is a manifesto which I can pretty much get behind.
• ‘A gift that falls from the sky’: why farmers are using Etna’s ash as fertiliser. - Funny that this is framed as a recent discovery as I remember learning as a child that the land around volcanos is highly fertile, although I get that excess ash is probably a short term problem.
• First ice cream van of the year 2026.
• Scholar, seductress, alchemist: who was the real Cleopatra? - Author wants to write about Cleopatra, realises she’ll never know anything accurate about Cleopatra so writes about herself in her place. Which, of course, is how history is written, crafting narratives from available facts that tell us stories about ourselves in the here and now.
• Ador Oh No! - On leaning into contradictory music.

Subscribing:

• Lifepod - Adam Greenfield has extended his Lifehouse book (which I very much enjoyed last year) into an ongoing podcast. He introduces it here. Will be checking it out tonight.
• Here’s a big list of indie media for you - Garbage Day collects a bunch of sites, blogs and newsletters which are attempting to fill the gap left by the evisceration of news media. A lot I recognise, many I don’t and will check out as I’ve been wanting to diversify my inputs of late. (Also, this sort of thing reminds of how every year or so the underground cartoonists du jour would put together an anthology of their work, maybe through Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly, which meant they were no longer underground and it was time to start hunting out the next bunch of hungry kids doing zines. So who’s out there?)

Watching:

• The waterwheel gearbox failed catastrophically ‌(37:27)

Telly:

• English Teacher - Catching up on the second season. I’d forgotten how mad this is. It’s like the teaching staff from Glee on meth.
• Paradise - Really not sure if this is bobbins or not. It’s definitely setting off my bobbins alarms.

Status:

Feeling pretty grumpy today, having the annoying feelings and the headaches that go with them. It’ll pass but I’m no fun to be around.

Spent a bit of time today setting up online shopping with Morrisons, our local supermarket, to take some of the shopping chores away from Fi. You would think you’d be able to scan the barcodes of the stuff in your cupboard, but no, you have to search for each item individually. I’m going to blame this on Morrisons being bought by asset-stripping private equity goons. Still, it kept my mind occupied for a while.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: 15-Minute Cities – How urban design entered the culture war - kinda delightful to hear grumpy old Ian Dunt be totally won over by the 15-minute city concept. The gendered nature of the opposition is kinda obvious but hadn’t really occurred to me.

Music:

• The Disintegration Loops - revisiting after yesterday’s article and this really is a remarkable piece of work. I can totally picture William Basinski blasting it out of the speakers on his roof knowing he’s got something important but not knowing exactly what it is until the twin towers fell. Well worth your time.

Reading:

• We need to talk about naked mole rats.
• Right about the problems but hilariously, tragically wrong about the solutions - back atcha, matey.

Watching:

• Africa (Toto)…but it lists every country in Africa ‌(1:41)
• Colin Furze: Secret Garage Update #18 Loverly Legs ‌(40:57) - Colin can be a bit much but I do enjoy his second channel where he goes into more detail about what he’s building.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Status:

Feeling OK today but keen not to push anything too far - the tinnitus is hovering like a coalmine canary. Want to get back to a full rested state before I start pottering too prescriptively but I can’t just do nothing. So I went to the pharmacist on my wee scooter to pick up my prescriptions, a nice flat journey along the river in the sunshine. Well, apart from the bits of the path where the tree roots are bursting through. That’s a fecking nightmare on three wheels.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: How To Survive The End of The World - the regular presenters, William and Anita, are starting to annoy me so this podcast is not long for my world. But it’s been a good ride and introduced me to some new things about the ancient Middle East.

Music:

• Black Box Recorder - they’re back, apparently. I have a memory of housemates being a bit worried I was listening to Child Psychology on repeat but that album got me through a tricky time. The albums hold up well and the third one (which I didn’t know well) is quite odd in places.

Reading:

• Populism is an information problem, but not in the way that you think - looking at John Harris' recent reporting from Denton and comparing his findings with Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine.
• Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ - I find Brand fascinating not just because he’s a kind of Zelig figure, appearing in the background of loads of things I’m interested in, but because he’s so often right about the problems but hilariously, tragically wrong about the solutions, believing the worst people in the world will save us.
• Molly Soda’s Desktop Diary #12 - “The process of transcribing something forces you to go inward, to give that thing your full attention, whether you want to or not."
• Tear Gun by Yi-Fei Chen - “Collects and freezes actual tears to shoot them back at the person who caused the cry." I feel like this sort of tech-art has disappeared in the last decade or so. I’m sure I used to see more of this kind of thing.
• Nick Land, Silicon Valley’s favorite doomsaying philosopher 🪜 - Another deluded weirdo from the past who should have drifted into obscurity but has been dragged back into the light by far-right tech capitalists. If you squint, the yin to Stewart Brand’s optimistic yang.
• How The Disintegration Loops became a requiem for the 9/11 attacks - Beautiful interview with William Basinski and Anohni about the 90s New York avant-garde queer scene that produced “one of the most important musical recordings of the 21st century.”

Watching:

• Sort through my potatoes with me ‌(3:13) - I did not know you could cut chitting potatoes in pieces and grow from them…
• Datsun L28 carb swap - filling injector ports with laser welding ‌(9:51) - I have no interest in cars but I do like watching people fix bits of them.

Telly:

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast - Five stars, excellent. Utterly bananas and held it together right to the end.

Status:

I wouldn’t say today was a crash exactly but it had some of the symptoms of a crash. Mostly the fight-flight bullshit of feeling like there’s a threat everywhere, which is the normal CFS response to being exhausted. But at the same time it’s not as severe as it’s been and I’m not incoherent or physically wiped out. So I’ve done 3.5 days of pottering which has resulted in a milder than usual crash. Also I’m aware of what’s going on and what I need to do to mitigate it - breath in such a way as to trick my parasympathetic nervous system into rest-and-digest mode. I’d say that’s progress.

Overnight listening:

• Alvin Lucier: Sounds unheard - If there’s one piece of art that, once I’d experienced it, helped contextualise everything I’d done before and informed everything in my subsequent art practice it’s Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. It ticks so many of my boxes so this hour long programme about his background, influences (Fluxus, of course!) and then playing the whole piece uninterrupted, is divine. It makes me want to make space-specific work again.

Music:

• Low, specifically the last two albums, Hey What and Double Negative, which I realised I’d not spend as much time with as I might have. They are, of course, marvellous.

Reading:

• My maddening battle with chronic fatigue syndrome: ‘On my worst days, it feels almost demonic’ - I got a lot out of this personal account of having ME/CFS by Hermione Hoby (a veteran of The Awl, so OK in my book) with a scary amount of recognition of the various stages and symptoms. The “brain retraining” stuff is interesting as it relates slightly to the advice I’m getting from the NHS, albeit with significantly lower expectations and way less wellness woo, for which I’m grateful. Whenever I’m exhausted my brain think’s I’m in danger and triggers responses that are exhausting, and I’m stuck in a feedback loop. Since the brain is just another lump of meat in my skin-sack it can be trained to do the right thing, right? Anyway, recommended for people trying to understand CFS, theirs or others, even if her ultimate conclusion is “illness is meaningless, random – it happens to all of us, to varying degrees, and it simply sucks.”
• Fix Your Hearts or Die - “The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism."

Telly:

• University Challenge
• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

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