Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

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

Found some hose.

Status:

Sister came over for an overdue catch up, which was nice. Afterwards I had a nap, but beforehand thought I’d do one of the 20 minute meditation recordings. Turns out they don’t really work when you’re tired and are not for getting off to sleep. Kinda obvious in hindsight.

While I failed to meditate my mind got to thinking about the “sensations” the guy in the recording wanted me to notice around my body and how they weren’t really real but more abstractions of the state of my body, communicated through electrical impulses. A portrait sketched by an unreliable narrator, as it were. And at that point I realised I should probably meditate when I’m more awake.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Mariana Trench - when I said yesterday I was giving up on IOT I obviously didn’t mean the new Misha Glenny ones, ersatz as they might still feel. This one taught me that the Pacific Ocean is shrinking as the Atlantic expands. Presumably the Americas will eventually crash into East Asia?

Music:

• Diamond Grove by Weirs - I thought this was Godspeed You! Black Emperor when track 3 cropped up on Night Tracks and while it does have strong similarities, the rest of the album is quite varied. I like this description from Pitchfork: “gently dismantles old ballads, standards, and hymns and strews the parts across their three-legged workbench to see what they can find.”

Reading:

• Interview with Amanda Seyfried and Mona Fastvold about The Testament of Ann Lee - I’ve admired Seyfried’s work since Mean Girls and this film, from the co-writer of The Brutalist, looks quite special.
• Ian Dunt: Breaking Trump - fascinating to see the playground bully back down over Greenland and it be reported as a masterful strategic negotiation.
• Lee Miller: fashion in times of shortage - Miller’s work for Vogue during WWII is more interesting than you might think.
• Did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove? - clickbait-y headline but I like how debates about artistic “originality”, which mostly served to boost collector value, are coming around to the fact the artists just like to talk and share ideas.

Watching:

• Let it go! sung in the original Klingon 2:51
• Timber framed barn part 37: Milling in the snow and starting the floor 51.55

Telly:

• Steal - time for some proper nonsense.
• Dead Ringers - five stars, no notes.

Shitty weather today but it’s nice in the shed.

Status:

Bit of a rough night with sweats and weird dreams, and then slept through most of the day. Feeling kinda antsy but trying to ride through it rather than act on it.

Andy came over to borrow my pressure washer and I was looking forward to inducting him (aged 38) into middle-age through the pursuit of cleaning paving stones with jets of water. It’s a rite of passage, like feeding a teen their first pint of bitter, but sadly the pressure washer decided not to switch on. He took it anyway because sometimes it does decide to switch on.

Then we had a nice chat about art and stuff, specifically the new film he wants to make which sounds exciting. Got me talking about when me and my mates would shoot photos with expired film around 2006, taking advantage of the moment when a lot of pro photographers were switching to digital and clearing out their stocks on eBay. That moment has long passed and film is dead expensive again. You don’t know you’re living in a golden age until it’s over.

This got me thinking about the art scenes and movements that occur in the backwash of industrial and economic change, which is probably most of them, and then I realised the conversation was getting far too interesting and I was getting a headache, so we called it a day.

Overnight listening:

I only managed a bit of In Our Time last night before having to switch to some music. I think I’ve reached the point where Melvyn Bragg is a bit of a prick (I’m working backwards and he mellows in later years), plus it’s the height of 2020 lockdowns so a lot of the academics are phoning in from home with terrible acoustics that stab my brain.

One of the milder tragedies of the early pandemic was broadcasters recording their end of a call with all the compression and aural artefacts. They should have gotten the contributor to make their own recording and then splice it all together in the edit. Even if they don’t have a decent mic it would be a marked improvement. Or just post them a decent mic.

So I’ve had a good run but it’s time to find something new to fall asleep to.

Reading:

• Generative AI is an expensive edging machine - Ryan has finally lost his patience after giving it a fair try.
• Forty years in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot
• Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy review – a saucy parade of bouncing bosoms, smirky smokers and a spot of BDSM - so glad she’s finally getting the respect she deserves.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Cleaning & Qol upgrades to the sawmill shed area 1:29:31

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Fi’s chitting potatoes in the shed. By the early autumn these will have grown into dinner.

Status:

Thought I might be able to do some bits and pieces today but had a slump in the afternoon. On the plus side a friend delivered loads of cardboard for me to shred. Can never have too much shredded cardboard. (It’s a composting thing.)

Yesterday I experimented with putting a grid of six photos in the post and I’m not happy with how it turned out, especially in the email where the formatting was nonexistent, so apologies for that. Will go back to keeping things simple.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Late Devonian Extinction

Reading:

• Meet Lawrence, music’s last true enigma
• ‘The most dangerous man in America’: how Paul Robeson went from Hollywood to blacklist
• Discourse 2000: Minds Immeasurably Superior To Ours: ANT WARS

Intriguing:

• fungal.page - the Wikipedia page for Hypha rendered with a generative font which spreads across the page like fungal mycelia.

Watching:

• Koyaanisqatsi in five minutes 5:14
• The hidden engineering of runways 18:39
• How long would you survive with no DNA? 3:16 - also explains why people on chemo loose their hair.

Telly:

• University Challenge
• Hercules the Bear - A Love Story - quite torn as to whether we enjoyed this or not. Filmmakers were strangely uncurious about the ethics of keeping a brown bear as a pet, and the whole thing sings out “the past is a foreign country”, but still a remarkable story about a man in trunks who wrestled a bear.
• Fallout

Status:

Another rest day. Friday really took it out of me it seems.

Tried a couple of things today. Took the cheap telephoto lens out into the garden and used it to photograph the rabbits, who aren’t that far away really, which meant lots of tight crops, narrow depth of field and vignetting. Was fun and meant I wasn’t just staring at the winter sky.

This evening was the second meditation class at the Buddhist centre. Fi was definitely going but I felt a little to fragile to deal with the potential overwhelm (yes, I know how mad this sounds) so I agreed that I would use the recordings they sent by email and do my own session in the living room. And it went really well. One of the biggest problems I’ve had with the CFS is busy brain where I don’t have the energy to hold it all in. This seems to help with that, or at least let me let go of worrying about it. Or some shit.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - I got Hunt Emerson’s adaptation in 1989 and saw his panels in my mind throughout listening to this. Made such an impression.

Music:

• Far From Nowhere by Josienne Clarke - I initially dismissed this as a bit cheesy but was quickly sucked in and have listened to the album twice over. Beautiful and possibly my new fave singersongwriter. Mea culpa.

Reading:

• So, How’s the Occupation Going for You?

Looking:

• Portrait of Britain winners

Watching:

• David Ehrlich’s 25 best films of 2025: a video countdown 23:58 - an annual treat that always makes the last year in cinema seem like something special. Always brings up some films I’d not noticed over the year. I’ll be adding Urchin, The Chronology of Water and Sirāt to my to-watch list.

Telly:

• Only Connect
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Status:

Recovery day again. Brain still fugsy, to the point where it’s 10pm and I’m not exactly sure what I got up to today, other than taking the Nikon into the shed (see above) and then having a nap in the afternoon.

I had a spicy noodle soup for lunch because my sinus pain was back. This is a post-exertion thing and, along with tinnitus, I use it as a red light to tell me to rest and relax. But it’s treatable by eating something with super-hot chillies in the mix. Apparently it opens everything up and relieves the pressure. Can highly recommend it next time you’re reaching for the Sudafed.

Overnight listening:

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

Music:

• nacen en silencio by Luis Fernando Amaya - came up on Night Tracks, something about being informed by mycelium networks between trees, which is right up my alley, and sounds pretty good too.

Reading:

• The spiral of suffering: For people with chronic illnesses, the relief and recognition of online communities can set up a toxic psychological trap - I’ve generally stayed away from the hardcore CFS communities, partly because I’m too fucking exhausted to deal with them but also because I’m very wary of my susceptibility to hope. I like the notion of “reverse survivorship bias” in these groups, where the most experienced members are the ones who never get better because those who get better leave.

Watching:

• Prepping chicken run for arctic temps 24:51 - by loading the middle with fresh compostables, which also serves as a good guide to how to get a nicely balanced hot heap going.
• This is why RAM is 500 bucks 1:13

Telly:

• The Revenge Club - they totally fucked the landing but if you ignore the last 10 minutes this was a fun ride with some great actors.

Hey Lav.

Status:

Worked through Fi’s notes from Friday’s CFS consult and together we broke down the pros vs cons for some recovery plans for the next few months. It’s been a lot so my brain is pretty shut down this evening.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Medieval Pilgrimage - some pretty curious stuff here that would make for a good art walking exercise. Paging Walkspace…
• Night Tracks
• Judith Butler: Who’s Afraid of Gender? - confess I used this to send me to sleep (their voice is perfect) but intend on listening properly.

Music:

• Any Other City by Life Without Buildings - popped up on shuffle and I’d forgotten how great Sue Tompkins' vocals are. I wonder what she’s up to now. (Exhibiting and collaborating with the Sleafords, it seems.)

Reading:

• John Higgs' New Moon Letter 1
• Sam Kriss: Good and evil in Iran 🪜 - Another excessively long history lesson from Sam that will need skimming but the opening about Zarathustra and the closing about the last few weeks in Iran are worth reading. (Substack have “age restricted” this citing the UK’s online safety act. I didn’t see anything dodgy in there, so click on the ladder if you don’t have a VPN.)
• John Harris: No amount of defections will change the fact that Reform and the Tories are singing the same tunes - nice use of the UB40 split as an analogy.

Watching:

• Making Lego car survive the biggest loop 11:20
• John Fogerty: Tiny Desk Concert 24:36
• True Facts: Is the Goffin’s Cockatoo the smartest bird? 11:02
• Laura Kampf 18.24

Telly:

• The Revenge Club

I need to get macro on those raindrops and capture the worlds inside them.

Status:

Rest day. Brother-in-law Jeff dropped of a drive today with my Flickr account on it, downloaded using the script that gave me the fear last week and converted into a static website which can be hosted anywhere. It all ran smoothly, because of course my fears were unfounded, and he enjoyed the distraction, so all was good. I can now cancel my Flickr pro and if they delete everything it’s not the end of that world, cos I’ve got a copy.

I don’t resent paying. I’m just not using it anymore and they (quite fairly) put the price up. Shame it’s so all or nothing, but them’s the ways of things.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Rosetta Stone

Music:

• Dogs by Nina Nastasia - blast from the John Peel days. Glorious. All Your Life is a masterpiece.

Reading:

• Discourse 2000: Quick, let’s make love, before you die: Death Planet - back to deconstructing obscure and rightfully forgotten 2000AD stories from 1978, this one drawn by one of the Eternaut guys but that can’t save it.
• ‘Soon I will die. And I will go with a great orgasm’: Xan Brooks interviews Alejandro Jodorowsky - what was your first contact with Jodo? Mine was a poster for Santa Sangre on the stairs of Forbidden Planet in 1989 which made me think, age 16, I should remember this, it might be important. It was.
• Thar She Blows - Erik Davis is teaching a course on Moby Dick, a book I suspect I will never read but still remain curious about. This is a nice introduction to its weird, Lovecraftian cosmic horror dimensions. “The Abyss that stares back with a creaturely eye”
• John Gyford’s memories of the Festival of Britain and Space House - Phil Gyford excerpts his dad’s contributions to a book on rebuilding post-war Britain.
• I research how people creatively express ‘queer joy’ online – here are three tips for trying it yourself - I’ve long believed that straight weirdoes can learn a lot from gay weirdos, for reasons I wrote about in 2022.
• Jason Williamson Interviews Ben Wheatley… and Vice Versa - “There is a line in it about envelopes, and afterwards we were like, ‘Fuck, when was the envelope invented?'"

Watching:

• Building a kitchen from scratch 19:14 - ostensibly a permaculture channel but I like his soothing voice so will happily watch him do DIY.

Telly:

• The Revenge Club
• Dead Ringers

Yes my woodworking apron has a rabbit print. What of it.

Status:

Had my chronic fatigue consult and it went well. At least I think it did. With these sorts of appointments I’m often so focussed on the moment that I don’t recall anything, so thankfully Fiona sits in and makes extensive notes which I will review tomorrow. But I came out of it feeling fairly positive and that I have some support, which is good. And then I went to bed for an hour and spent the rest of the day grazing the internet (see below) and hanging with the rabbits.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: On Liberty - Misha Glenny’s first IOT starts strong. He’s more polite and “presenter-y” than the let’s-get-on-with-it Bragg but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As much as I love the show Bragg could be a tiresome prick, especially when he was younger (there’s a reason I’m working through the archive backwards - he really mellows in the last couple of years). Importantly the mix of academics who aren’t that comfortable broadcasting but are giving it a go is still intact.

Music:

• Cuncordu e Tenore de Orosei: Novarea (Chants sacrés et profanes de Sardaigne) (Apple Music link, can’t find a better one to share) - heard this on Radio 3’s Night Tracks and immediately had to look it up. Starts off as monkish chanting with an Arabic twist and then these harsh, semi-discordant low harmonies kick in which tickle me in the best way. Reminds me of the soundtrack to one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries, possibly one of the volcano ones, though without rewatching I can’t be sure. [later: Herzog’s frequent collaborator Ernst Reijseger has recorded with Voches De Sardinia who are very similar.]

Reading:

• A symbol for the ⁂ fediverse - nice that it’s just a typographical character so should work pretty much everywhere.
• Adelaide and the crisis of free speech - a good primer on the fundamentals of free speech.
• Elon Musk cannot get away with this 🪜 - “this” being his social network generating and publishing kiddie porn. I have a horrible feeling he will get away with it though. When this story broke I checked our right wing tabloids to see their take on it. Their morals have always been flexible but child porn is usually a constant for immediate damnation and cancellation. This time, nothing. Is the Daily Mail afraid of Musk’s wealth and power? Or, like all the companies in the article, is it just in their ideological interests to let this slide.
• What making community compost means now - cass marketos reflects on ICE agents hanging around the LA nonprofits she works with and how her work feeds into community resilience. Nicely articulates why I’m involved with composting in my city - it’s about building foundations on which we can connect and build further.
• Just Two Things: Politics | Economics - not the first time I wish Andrew would abandon the “two things” model and post these as independently linkable pieces, but that’s a quibble. Both are good today.

Bookmarking:

• Brewing Collectives - How to start a permacomputing collective - need to figure out exactly what this is but it looks like a combination of permaculture philosophy, open source software and mutual aid. Could be interesting.

Watching:

• David Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti record ‘Warszawa’ | Adam Buxton 3:30 - some rather serious articles about the recording of Low are floating around which made me want to see this again.
• Mark Kermode reviews 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple 11:27

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - Peanut Hamper!
• The Revenge Club

No, we don’t want to go for a run in a rain. Don’t make us.

Status:

• In theory a rest day but I also needed to prepare for the CFS session tomorrow which has been a bit exhausting despite trying to spread it out over the last week. Another data point!

• Fi took the rabbits to the vet for Lav’s vaccination - we like to take them together so they don’t freak out any more than is necessary. The new vaccine for RHVD2 is finally available after some shortages, and in good time as it’s been reported in Wolverhampton. They’ll be getting their jabs shortly but it does add another £100 a year onto the rabbit-owning bill. I mention this just in case there’s anyone who thinks rabbits are a low-cost, low-effort pet. They’re not.

• Yes, I really should do a rabbit advocacy webblogsletterthing.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Emilie du Châtelet
• Night Tracks

Reading:

• You’ve heard about who ICE is recruiting. The truth is far worse. I’m the proof. - journalist reports on the application process, accidentally gets hired.
• The oligarchs pushing for conquest in Greenland. ‌Trump’s fixation… may seem like the demented ravings of a mad king. But to a cohort of plutocrat weirdos, it makes perfect sense. - dreaming of a resource rich utopia free of pesky rules and regulations.

Recommending:

• Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – an electrifying parade of sex, smoke and sullen silence - I’ve seen Goldin’s work in person twice, the first time as a retrospective in 2002 in Whitechapel which was a life-changing experience, embedding thoughts and ideas I didn’t realise were there until much later. Then Tate Modern had the slideshow up when Fi and I were visiting a decade back. I insisted she see it with me and she bought me the book version for my birthday. This years all 126 photos from the book are on show in London and I dearly wish I could go and see them.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - first episode was great!

Some wee beastie took a bite out of this discarded potato and agreed we were right to discard it.

Status:

• Rest day today.
• Fi went and got a bale of hay from the horse shop and it now costs £8. A few years ago it was a fiver. Still very cheap for a month’s worth of rabbit food but that sure is some inflation for dry grass.
• Been thinking about the concept of ethical or sustainable photography. It usually revolves around not using polluting chemicals to develop images - see CuriosoLab who I linked to the other day - and I’m wondering how this might relate to photography’s history as a mechanical medium. I remember Vilém Flusser talking about how photographs are authored primarily by the political, economic and industrial systems that produced the camera equipment - the photographer themselves is just along for the ride. (I did a talk about this in 2016, and Flusser is probably more relevant today than ever). So if cameras are authored by political, economic and industrial systems which we consider problematic… Maybe we need to get back to making cameras and lenses from scratch, not just the chemistry.
• Explained myself to Mastodon.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Saint Cuthbert

Reading:

• Adam Greenfield dissects the Wuben G5 rechargeable pocket flashlight - his point about the unnecessary multicolour option reminds me of this piece about Japanese web design, specifically that if something doesn’t have a function people might think it isn’t good enough.
• The History of Web Design, 1993–2012: Season 5 Launch - a nice overview of the key themes that emerged in that era. I’d never call myself a web designer but the accessibility of HTML / CSS and the hackability of basic Wordpress themes meant I had a lot of fun in the late 2000s.
• Is Tehching Hsieh the most extreme performance artist ever? - I looked at Hsieh when I was figuring out how to spend three months in a gallery for Instructions for Humans and he’s really interesting.

Watching:

• The Elsa edit craze of the 2010s 16:31
• We were at ICE’s invasion in Minneapolis 50:55 - really good reporting from Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick.

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge
• Fallout

Yin and Yang would have been good names for these two. They’re utter opposites in temperament yet quite complementary.

Status:

May have overdone it at the allotment yesterday, which is annoying as I was specifically trying not to – Fi did most of the lifting with me just along for the ride. But there I was, awake at 4am with my nervous system on overdrive and my brain conjouring up the weirdest of narratives. A handy data point for Friday’s consult and a reminder that things are not OK.

Was pretty well recovered by the afternoon, which was handy as Fi had arranged for us to go to the Buddhist centre’s introduction to meditation course this evening. She’d checked that I’d be able to duck out if I needed to and along we went. I managed about 10 minutes of the body scan meditation before having to stop and put my earplugs in because it turns out focussing on all the different parts of your body when they all hurt is not much fun. But I get the point of the exercise and it did feel worth trying.

There was also the issue of it being rather oversubscribed (the January resolutions effect, I suppose) and I haven’t been in a room with that many people for over a year. Turns out even a Buddhist centre can be overwhelming. Fi stayed for the rest of the session while I hid out in the quiet room with my earplugs in.

Apparently they’re going to send out some recordings of the meditation instructions, which might be better for me to try in my own controlled space. And again, this was a useful data point to bring up on Friday.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Plague of Justinian - one of those subjects which gets oddly less interesting the more they talk about it. Did the plague have any lasting effects? Not really, given all the other shit that was going on circa 550 CE.

Music:

• Truckin’ on: Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead’s 10 best recordings - is it time for me to finally get into the Dead? I feel like I’ve been putting this off for 40 years.

Reading:

• Garbage Day: We’re all just content for ICE. ‌Four days on the ground in Minneapolis
• Peter Thiel’s New Model Army - make it past Carole Cadwalladr’s depressing reporting about the UK’s capitulation to Trump for a compendium of people fighting back against ICE’s fascism.
• Molly Soda’s Desktop Diary #11 - “Emo Ariel has started making a lot of sense to me lately”

Watching:

• Come and harvest my parsnips with me - growing parsnips in a drain pipe!

Reached the point in my sky-and-tree photos where I need to put something in the way.

Status:

Made a very overdue run to the allotment consisting of six weeks worth of rabbit poop and pissy hay and human food waste. I don’t usually like to leave it that long but at least the winter weather has kept things fragrant. My sister is planning to do a full turn of all three heaps this weekend and I’m looking forward to seeing how the latest batch has come out before it’s spread on the beds. Harvest is upon us.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Finnish startup plans new autofocusing eyeglasses - While I know this technology is years away from not being annoying and buggy I would dearly love autofocus (or just manual focus, to be honest) on my face.
• Erich von Däniken dead at 90 - interesting that this hoaxer never seems to come up in the “weird seventies” surveys, probably because he was a total charlatan, but I think his cultural success is relevant to the discourse. I wonder if Erik Davis will have something to say in his next newsletter (and if he’ll manage to crowbar Philip K Dick in).
• The pet I’ll never forget: Dory the 10kg rabbit, who saved me from a diabetic coma - a tragic tale reported as a heartwarming story. I’m glad Dory had a loving owner and that she saved this guy’s life, but I see a lonely bun fed a terrible diet (carrots are not rabbit food!) that died too young. Giant rabbits can have serious heath issues due to breeding and should be fostered with great care. No criticism intended - ignorance is rife and it took us years to learn proper rabbit care - I just wish the reporting on rabbits was less blasé.
• Grant Morrison’s unbounded summoning possibilities: The Filth, The Invisibles, and moving towards a non-dual consciousness - I’m not a fan of Morrison’s writing (except maybe St Swithuns Day - everything after that is kinda annoying) but I’ll admit they surf around some interesting ideas when you get them talking.
• Why I try to treat people the way I treat porridge - lovely to see Michael blogging again.

The funny pages:

• the (best of the)^n best, where n>=1
• The Invention of Anarchism
• Alison Bechdel: 8 Things You Need to Start Your Own Commune (archive)

Watching:

• Surrealism (and Dada) (1971) 17:17 - a fifty year old short film about a hundred year old art movement and yet it feels so fresh and relevant.

Telly:

• Bay of Fires - finished season 1. Took a while to get going but was a lot of fun! Gonna take a break before season 2. Probably give it ⭐️⭐️⭐️½/5.

Flying low over the garden

Status:

• Took a zopiclone last night to get my sleeping back on schedule and was out like a light. I have a few left over from before my doctor got permission from the CFS specialist to prescribe me melatonin and maybe take one every 2-3 months when things swing a bit too nocturnal. I was developing a bit of a tolerance back then so it’s good to see that’s worn off.

• Got a notion in my noggin about organic photo developing, wondering if there’s some way to combine composting with photography. It’s a very loose notion and I’m not making any plans, but I’m intrigued by these “mud photos” developed using a mix of coffee grounds and wood ash, and this research into plant-based developers. Probably not places I’d want to end up, but definitely related.

• Speaking of photography, my Flickr subscription runs out at the end of the month and they’ve raised the price to £74 a year. Since I barely use the site anymore and am just keeping it as a linkable archive it might be time to call it a day after 21 years. But I would like to have it as a static website so I had a look at this thing on Github which quickly gave me a stress headache at the prospect of it all going horribly wrong, so I stepped away and asked a friend for help. I think I have mild PTSD from trying to be a digital artist.

• I see the BBC are showing Nuts in May for its 50th. My brain always gets the plot mixed up with Sightseers so looking forward to getting that straightened out again.

Overnight listening:

• Late Junction

Reading:

• Ten notes on the US attack on Venezuela
• John Harris: The UK’s high streets have reached a tipping point – and Reform will reap the benefits

Watching:

• Laura Kampf

Telly:

• Bay of Fires