Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

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

One of the photos taken yesterday in the park

Status:

Had a meeting with work today where they accepted my decision to take a six month unpaid sabbatical. Without going into all the details, part of my chronic fatigue recovery involves finding my new “baseline”, the level of activity I can do without hurting myself. Going back to work last autumn, even for an hour or two a week, was too early and pushed me back into a boom-bust cycle. I still hope to return to Loaf in some form but for now I need a full break to focus on functioning better (I won’t be getting better, at least not to my previous levels).

I will probably write more about this another time – the above was a struggle to get out and I’m pretty wiped.

Overnight listening:

• The Unbelievable Truth

Shooting:

Photos from Cannon Hill Park, 28 January - shot yesterday on our walk. With my Flickr sub expiring this month I’m experimenting with the photo sharing that comes with my Apple rent. Like most iCloud stuff it’s poorly thought out and annoying to use but the photos look nice.

Reading:

• From incel culture to the White House: American Psycho’s dark hold on modern masculinity - like Fight Club before it…
• Best gas masks - “There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision." Sarah Jeong knocking it out of the park with this thoughtful piece about tear gas disguised as a Wirecutter parody.
• The UK paid £4.1 million for a bookmarks site - twenty years ago I was involved in an effort to stop Birmingham local government folks paying silly money for shite websites. Ah well.
• The rise of end times fascism - Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Telly:

• A Thousand Blows
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Photographing fowl with the wrong lens.

Status:

Couple of things happened today. Fi took us to the big park to feed the birds. Well, she fed the birds and I took photos while looking for the next bench as we walked around the lake. It was nice to get outside. Photos to follow when I have the energy to process them.

Then I had a quick nap before a call with the Meridian centre to see what help I need going forward. I’ve been with them for a couple of years now and it’s been very useful but my original reason for needing help has been rather superseded by circumstances so it was good to get that on the record.

After that my nostrils started getting that burning sensation that says my nervous system is beginning to misfire so I crashed on the sofa and did some jigsaws to calm the tinnitus.

Overnight listening:

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

Reading:

• The Dildo Distribution Delegation - Chucking sex toys at ICE. “The very first rubber dick to touch government-issued leather boots triggered a full-blown chemical weapons response."
• What Jez is doing now
• A Scream Into the Void - Bob Levin digs deep into Joe Sacco’s The Once and Future Riot.
• Richard Avedon’s working class heroes - a photographer I’ve never really explored properly.
• ‘Fascists threatened us but we always took them on’: 1 in 12, the anarchic Bradford club still fighting after 45 years - great to see this is a Home of Metal project!

Sighing:

• AI skills for the UK workforce - this HM Gov report is a joke. Which makes it all the more terrifying.

Telly:

• Fallout
• Amadeus

Status:

Feeling better today. Still a little fragile but found myself making jokes so my mood must be improved. I’m reluctant to draw too many conclusions but it does seem I was brain-tired and just needed to rest. Now I just need to remember this the next time I feel like that and not get too upset about it. Treat it like a tired leg and rest it.

Apparently (I say because I haven’t been out of the house for weeks) the fascists-masquerading-as-patroits have been in Stirchley putting up their flags again, which would be cause for anxiety and depression, but it seems they were barred from the local pub and kicked out of a curry house. Both are the sort of establishments that might be (understandably) keen to stay neutral and ride out this shitstorm but clearly a line has been crossed.

Combine this with news that ICE are in retreat in Minnesota after a concerted grassroots resistance and it feels like a good day. Now if only our mainstream politicians would join us.

Overnight listening:

• Judith Butler: Who’s Afraid of Gender?
• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Minnesota proved MAGA wrong 🪜 - Focussing on the mutual aid networks that emerged in the absence of any institutional resistance to the occupation.
• I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026 - I was waiting for the Comics Journal to put the boot in with this obituary and they do so in the time honoured tradition of just stating the facts. The quote from Berkeley Breathed a year before Adams got his first gig is just ::chef’s kiss::.

Bookmarking:

• Accessibility for Everyone - Laura Kalbag has put her book on accessible web design online for free. Worth keeping on hand for when your well intentioned graphic design friend who does lovely posters makes a pretty but utterly inaccessible website.

Watching:

• Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet ‌(3:38) - Dan Olsen is posting short videos. These are desperate times. End of days.
• Maria W Horn & Sara Parkman present Funeral Folk live at Supersonic Festival 2025 (8:03)

Telly:

• University Challenge
• Amadeus

Status:

Been a bit fragile these last couple of days. Had something in the ballpark of a wobble and a panic attack last night, which wasn’t fun. The mental health side of chronic fatigue continues to be my main stumbling block as once I’m in a fatigue state my brain kinda stops functioning properly, and I need my brain to know what to do to recover. But the good news is before yesterday this hadn’t happened for a while, and it passes, so I just need to do my breathing exercises and wait it out. Not great in the short term though.

I’ve had a couple of mentions that this daily thing I do here seems impressive. I want to put paid to that notion. Please bear in mind I’m bascially doing nothing “productive” during my day and spend a lot of time distracting my brain with internet stuff. I make little notes in a text document and by the evening there’s enough there to post. Some days are better than others but I know I can always send out a few links and a status sentence even on a shit day.

I’m pleased with how this little blog/zine is working for me. It’s a medium I’ve been mucking about in for 30+ years, so it’s a comfort zone, but it’s teaching me ways of working within my new limits. More importantly it gives me a sense of having actually done something with my day, however small, and of reaching out into the world.

Overnight listening:

• Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go by Jason Molina
• It’s Up to Emma by Scout Niblett

Reading:

• Yes, It’s Fascism 🪜 - nice to see the hand-wringing centrists of the Atlantic have finally accepted the screamingly obvious.
• ‘Paranoid, Loathsome, Neurotic’: The Inimitable R. Crumb Looks Back 🪜 - David Mairowitz, who co-authored Kafka for Beginners with Crumb, visits his old friend in his twilight years.
• Garbage Day: Minneapolis isn’t backing down, will Trump?

Looking:

• Molly Crabapple’s portrait of Alex Pretti defending his city - a fantastically angry image, reminiscent of Ralph Steadman at his prime. Substack have age-blocked this in the UK for no good reason but she’s also posted it to Bsky.

Watching:

• Look at this parsnip! (1:20)

Telly:

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• Steal - another show that didn’t quite know how to end but the ride there was fun and there were some nicely filmed sections in the opening eps. Four stars.
• Only Connect - I got an answer right in the final! (Yes, it was that one, of course)

Status:

Today’s inadequate fatigue metaphor is that someone has injected expanding foam insulation into the gap between my brain and my skull.

Overnight listening:

• Judith Butler: Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Reading:

• Clavicular and contentmaxxing - via Warren Ellis who notes: “People like this guy are the creators whom a frightening number of people are listening to the most, these days. This is television now. Pay attention. It’s weird."
• Are you not entertained? - “a short essay on the politics of spectacle, or maybe the spectacle of politics, and how that explains the state of many things right now." Rather disconcertingly the second mention of this Clavicular wanker in my inbox today.
• Wrong Lens, Right Place - nice short piece about shooting portraits with an 11mm lens. “Unusual gear creates conversation. People get curious. That curiosity loosens them up, and suddenly you’re not just taking their picture. You’re collaborating." That’s been my experience too with my weird contraptions back in the day. (Which I’ve been thinking about recently.)
• The great crime decline is happening all across the USA - thanks to “‌a huge investment by the federal government in education, police, librarians, community centers…" Every so often my MP asks what my priorities are and I have to make a note that yes, crime is important, but it’s only really going to be solved by fixing all the other “soft” things. Nice to have some proof.
• “Throwing my camera was the right thing to do”: The photographers behind the viral protest photos - inconsequential sidebar: I like how John Abernathy shoots at f11 with a wide lens so everything’s in focus. I tend to lean on the good-old fuzzy background trick but would like to try this more. Reminds me of Joel Meyerowitz’s deep field photos of New York.

Watching:

• Hot Compost for Cold Snap (18:33)
• Video update Cha0sHof week 174 (4:19)
• Writing for Comics Masterclass with John Allison (1:29:00) - contains a nice overview of the early 2000s webcomics boom and subsequent decline.

Telly:

• Steal

Some fine Jelly Ear growing on the yellow tree.

Status:

Pretty exhausted today. Tinnitus buzzing and in need of rests in dark rooms.

Overnight listening:

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

Reading:

• How Martin Rowson and Ella Baron draw the age of Trump and turmoil: two cartoonists go head-to-head - as someone who cannot make their hands do even basic drawing I’ve always found watching cartoonists akin to witnessing magic.
• Favourite well-made apps and sites - haven’t explored a list like this for a while, probably because most apps and sites are bloody awful these days, but there are a few here I know and like (Bear, Kottke, Floor796, iA Writer, RegExr and of course gov.uk) so I reckon it’ll be worth a few clicks.
• Ben Wheatley curates a brain-melting sci-fi movie marathon - I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover Wheatley, a fellow 1972 alumnus, was an Alex Cox Moviedrome fan. (I too saw Testsuo at a formative age, in a double bill with Akira circa 1990)
• Backseat Software - “the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet. This post is about how we got here."

Watching:

• Saving a yellowed Sega Saturn from a flea market 19:50
• Sesame Street: Pinball Animation Countdown Compilation 12:32 - 1 2 3 4 5, 6 7 8 9 10, 11 12

Telly:

• Steal