Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Journal

One of the original functions of Notes & Links was to make the most of my sofa-bound internet surfing by making it into a writing exercise, and that is dependent on me doing that, hence some days there’s a lot and some days there’s nothing at all. As I figure out how to do more things within my recently limited capacity I will probably do less blogging here, like over the last few days.

I wish I could say I’d been off travelling the country having adventures but I’ve actually been even more sofa-bound than usual, locked to the laptop as the last 25 of my life scroll before my eyes. It turns out that I did manage to backup and save the majority of my blogging and those backups can be relatively easily turned into a readable format. So I’ve been working on putting everything I’ve published into a single website.

Originally I was going to select “the good stuff” and add it to the 72 Pete blog, but then I went off that idea. I think I need to have everything there in the big bucket which I can then link to and curate as needed. Or something. I’m still working it out.

But while I’m doing this I’m not really paying attention to the wider internet, and so I don’t really have much to post at the end of the day. It’s also not very interesting to write about while I’m in the middle of it all. This will be a long-term project, I think, not just to restore it but to then build a website that allows me to interrogate and contextualise it properly. I’ll want to have the first version up before Christmas and then start iterating it.

So I have a project, I guess is the news. Something I can work on slowly during the down times but which can challenge me when I’m able to be challenged. And I might end up with an answer to what the fuck happened over the last quarter century.

Annotated linkage:

• Rachael Stirling on eating her mother Diana Rigg’s ashes — A rebuttal to some nasty weirdo-shaming by the moralising tabloid press, but also a rather touching story about grief and the strangeness of having someone’s ashes. I remember the box of my mum’s ashes being both profound and mundane, presented as they were in a functional wooden box that could have held a fancy bottle of wine. (This was our choice - she wouldn’t have wanted anything more.) After the funeral life celebration we drove back with ‘her’ in the footwell of the car. When she was brought from New Zealand to the UK for scattering we had to get an export license because these were human remains. And yet there’s no regulations on what I can or cannot do with the small pot of ‘her’ I chose to keep hold of and have on the mantlepiece. At least none that I know of.
• The everyday genius of William Eggleston — There’s a big Eggleston exhibition at the Photographers Gallery through to Feb next year and I’d really like to see it if I can. Eggleston is not just one of the transformative photographers of the 20th century, his work deserves to be seen in print.
• Screenshot: Graphic Novels — I had no idea that Mark Kermode had a regular show (with new-to-me Ellen Jones) on Radio 4 about themes in cinema. This came to my attention due to the comics angle and I’ve added it to my stream for future listenings. The draw here is an interview with Sook-Yin Lee about Paying For It (still not officially out in the UK, because capitalism is shite).
• John Harris: Finally, a helpful intervention in the ‘overdiagnosis’ wars.
• Girls is coming back for a season of them turning 40 — I’m rather delighted and excited about this.
• He was a crook — Revisiting Hunter S. Thompson’s eviscerating obituary of Richard Nixon. Who do we have who can write to this caliber about Trump?
• They’re going to kill us all to build a beach resort — Cat & Girl pulling no punches this time.

Exhibition plugging:

Walkspace: Contemporary Walking Art

A bunch of my friends are involved with this show in Kings Heath, Birmingham from 15-25 October. Please pop in if you’re around.

Journal

Friday we had a visit from a couple of 11 year old girls and their mum to see the rabbits. I realised I haven’t been in the company of 11 year old girls for quite a while and they’re quite odd, giggling and whispering to each other. But they were also lovely and kind to the rabbits and that’s what counts. Hopefully I impressed on them that rabbits are not easy pets so they won’t be straight down the breeding centre (aka pet shop).

After that I went to destroy an arm chair that Fi’s sister can’t get out of the house. It took taking the hinges off the front door to get it in and they’ve decided it’s not worth it, so I offered to take it apart with my tools, a process not unlike skinning and boning a corpse. It should have been a low-effort job but I did get a little invested and probably overdid it. But it was fun! I miss being able to just let go, and later I paid the price.

Saturday has been a rest day, after Friday’s misadventures. The previous night’s crash didn’t continue but I did have some very weird stress dreams that went all over the place, so something was not right and I’ve been resting and watching the tinnitus.

Otherwise I’ve mostly been going through my old blog posts having found some Wordpress exports from around 2008 to 2015 which I can process using this script into readable Markdown files. It continues to be a strange experience. If I had an “imperial phase” it was probably around those years when I was mostly brimming with confidence and doing loads of things. Some of them I’m still proud of, some of them not so much, but that’s how it goes.

I’m looking to bring these posts, along with the original blog from 2000 to 2008, back as part of moving the 72 Pete blog to a new system and I’m struggling with whether to bring everything back wholesale or whether to treat them as archival curiosities. I think they have value as a testament to how I’ve learned to write over the years but I wouldn’t stand by a lot of them, because I’ve learned and gotten better at all that thinking and writing stuff.

But I’m also fascinated by it, cringe and all. I’d forgotten so much of the minutiae, let alone the order it all happened in, and here it is, a map of my past.

Much to ponder…

ADHD and autism at risk of over-diagnosis, says government review

via Tim Clare who has things to say about this. I particularly like his take on seeing autism & ADHD as modern monsters in the philosophical sense.

It reminds me of the chapter in Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger where connects the vaccines-cause-autism conspiracy to Lorna Wing’s research on depictions of autism in Celtic mythology.

The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings, who were identical doubles of the kidnapped children, only with physical deformities or behavioral “trickster” challenges, like having a withdrawn, otherworldly affect.

Back to Tim Clare:

The monster ought not to be here, but it is here, therefore it is not the monster which is wrong, but our model of the world. That’s profoundly destabilising. The monster & my old way of thinking cannot co-exist. This is the threat of the neuroweird.

Many people - politicians, doctors, parents - see the neurodiversity movement & feel the threat it poses to their worldview. If some minds are different, if some of us are fucked by the school system as it stands - totally shamed & brutalised by its inadequacy - that requires radical change.

I also came across this jpeg of text (I know…) which sparked a continuation of this thought around the neurodiverse merely being and expression of the old ways. There’s this notion that “the weird” used to be the normal ways of the world and that to fight against it was to battle the fates, something that would usually end in tears. Since the enlightenment this has switched so that “the weird” now means aberrations to the norm. Except this normal is a construct of modernity and some of us struggle to make our slowly evolving brains work within it, because we’re weird.

Or something. I wrote about this at some length in 2024.

• See also Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock which I remember being on bookshelves through my childhood. I wonder if it’s worth reading now?

Linkage

• Chasing a plane across the Moon ‌(11:46) — A delightful short documentary about an obsession with filming the moon which turned into an obsession with filming a jet plane in front of the moon.
• Next year, YouTube will allow testing different versions of the same video — As someone who links to thinks expecting people who follow the links to see the same thing I saw, this is kinda disturbing. But then I guess people edit stuff all the time, so nothing is fixed. And also, given the nature of human perception and memory, can we ever be said to have the same experience of media in the first place?
• The strange world of… Steve Reich — The Quietus marks his 90th with a introductory listening list. I’m also grateful for drawing my attention to Reich Remixed, a 90s album of mixes by the likes of Coldcut and Howie B which I’m kinda surprised I didn’t come across at the time, though I probably wasn’t looking in the right direction.

Yesterday I popped to the allotment with my sister for a bit. Had fun getting the scooter to go up the muddy hill — it’s really not an off-road vehicle, but it made it. Was a nice sunny afternoon after the morning rain. We talked about her plans for it now it’s all set up to her liking (due in part to my condition she’s pretty much taken it all on from Fi and myself) it’s probably time to let it mature and see what works and doesn’t work. That said, I’m wondering about a geodesic dome fruit cage and better water harvesting. Of course.

The weather app reported 8mm of rain that morning which increased the level in the water butts by 11.4cm. This means I can do some fun maths using the surface area of the roof and/or the butts and see, well, something I guess. I should probably get my own water gauge to get an accurate reading for the garden rather than rely on the apps. Oh hell, I’m going to have a weather station at this rate, aren’t I…

Today was a relatively lazy day. I did have a very pleasant visit from an old internet friend I hadn’t see since being homebound. She’s one of those people who happily talks about random shit with no prompting, like being in a pub, something I don’t get to do any more. Tinnitus levels were within reasonable limits although I did need to rest afterwards, as expected, and decided to watch a movie to stop my brain racing.

Linky links:

• The people holding up the internet — You know that XKCD cartoon about all modern digital infrastructure being supported by a hobby project some random nerd has been updating in their spare time since forever? This is a deep-dive into what those projects are, who’s running them and what they support. And it’s both awesome that people do this and terrifying how dependent we are on them. (Caution - annoying ‘animated essay’ nonsense, but worth it.)
• The wildlife set to appear on UK banknotes revealed — Hooray for the hedgehog that will be on the money I’ll keep in my wallet for an emergency, except I never take my wallet anywhere anymore!
• Firefox Proton theme — Firefox has updated, as it is won’t to do, but this time with a snazzy new look. I don’t hate it but others who do have suggested this back-to-basics theme which I really like. Get out of the way, browser.
• ChatGPT was asked 101 times to recreate the image exactly with zero changes — Nice to see the spirit of Alvin Lucier is still alive.
• Mamdani’s “Richard Scarry Socialism” can make city life simple again — “There are no memecoins in Busytown. [..] The people of Busytown are not followed by an all-seeing Palantir eye that compiles a data profile on them. Private equity has not bought their apartment buildings. There is no slopaganda in Busytown. In Busytown, life is straightforward and things are what they seem to be."
  • See also Welcome to Business Town, the New York the tech oligarchs want to see.
  • Also see also I added Karl Marx quotes to Richard Scarry illustrations and they kinda fit.
• Intergalactic Pam & Terry — Pam & Terry Intergalactic.

The weather this last few days has been notable. It’s not been hot exactly but it certainly hasn’t been October-typical. I did put a thick jumper on the other day but then today I was in a t-shirt. It’s that transitional thing where a snapshot is misleading and a trend will be clear in hindsight, but it’s still quite odd. Today there was no wind. The trees were still and the clouds (pictured) were static. I watched them for a good 10 minutes and nothing moved.

Psychotherapy was good today. Getting into the nitty gritty on some stuff.

Lavender is still digging her hole.

I’ve continued to scour the Internet Archive for my otherwise vanished weblogs of yore and today came across 13,500 words I wrote in 2011 about what we then called hyperlocal media. It’s certainly something and I’m going to be intrigued to see what, if anything, people think of it when I bring it back. Around that time I was trading as a blogging and then a social media consultant and it’s very discombobulating looking back at my output. I was so confident! So sure of myself! A bit of prick at times! Wrong about a lot of things, of course, but then we all were, and in places I was pretty on the money.

I need to write a final newsletter on 72 Pete to tell the people subscribed there that they’re no longer going to be subscribed. Then I can make the replacement site live and start backfilling it with my writing archive. I keep remembering stuff I wrote that will need to be found and reformatted. So many words…

Today’s links

• Pirating the Pirates - A deep dive into the underground film restoration networks who work to make illegal digital copies of films close to their original quality (which the studios are either unwilling or unable to do) and how that work is now feeding back into official licensed archive releases by boutique BlueRay labels.
• The medieval Voynich manuscript has confounded scholars for centuries. Have they been reading it wrong all this time? — Always nice to come across a weird old book I hadn’t seen before, and this is quite the doozy with “pages filled with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, pictures of nude women and indecipherable text”. Once thought to have been written by a mad old man it’s likely a collection of folk knowledge and remedies, but no-one really knows because the language is lost. You can download the whole thing here and it’s really quite beautiful.
• We are going to kill “unalive” — Good rant from Anil Dash on the chilling effect algorithmic filtering is having on language, where terms like “unalive” have become common due to the perceived visibility penalty of writing “dead”. The perception is the thing. Because no-one really knows what the corporate platforms do and don’t punish, people play it safe and self-censor probably unnecessarily, reducing their expression further. A great read with some useful advice for pushing back.
• Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges — Rare to have a petition come my way that isn’t fuelled by bile and fury. This is simply a very good idea that I don’t think has been articulated before. And given that gov.uk websites are incredibly efficiently designed this shouldn’t cost too much to implement.

I didn’t really feel like blogging yesterday, so I didn’t. Not much caught my eye in the feeds and I didn’t do much of note (although I did briefly pop out on the scooter) so when it came to the end of the day and my text document was empty I figured, fuck it.

What I had been doing was building a new home for the 72 Pete blog which I want to move off Ghost before the next billing cycle. I like Ghost but I really can’t justify the cost so I’m switching to Hugo and hosting it on the cheap.

Hugo turns out to be exactly what I’m after. Simple to use with all the functionality I missed from Wordpress (back when Wordpress was good) and none of the bullshit I was getting from Eleventy. I’ve managed to import all the posts into a design that I don’t hate and could go live with it right now if I needed to. But there’s no rush.

I was thinking about what I might do with this blog and I’m seeing it as a repository for my writing. I’ve written a lot over the years and it’d be good to have it all in one place. To this end I’ve been going through my first blog on the Internet Archive (thankfully there was way less internet in the 2000s so they saved it all without me asking) and once I hit my stride around 2003-4 there’s some nice bits of writing there. Or maybe I just have enough distance not to feel too much cringe.

And then I’ll have a nice ongoing project of searching for things I’ve written on other websites and copying them into my archive. Should be a fun distraction for the winter.

For this week I’m thinking I’ll not pressure myself to post here. I’ve been thinking for a while of lowering the frequency so I can allocate the energy to something else so we might try 3-4 times a week? Will see. I’m sure I’ll get the itch to bombard y’all with links again soon.

Went to visit my sister briefly today on the scooter, thus normalising the whole “going out on the scooter” thing, and when I returned Fiona informed me that Lav had been furiously digging out Wally’s flop-hole and diligently spreading the soil across the lawn. We let her continue until she seemed done and then brushed it all back in.

Happy to say the soil down there looks pretty healthy, as you’d hope having been pooped on my multiple rabbits for over a decade.

In other news I had a look at Hugo, one of the static website generators, and it looks like it might be at just the level I need. Gonna have a deeper dive this weekend I reckon.

• Cloudbusting - An interview with Ingrid Burrington on the new edition of Networks of New York — I got the first edition of this in 2016 and loved how it attempted to make the internet tangible in the city. My copy of v2 is currently somewhere in the Atlantic — looking forward to seeing it!
• Why Jewish Greens are urging party members to vote against the motion: Zionism is racism — “Calling all forms or interpretations of Zionism ‘racism’ is painting a very diverse group of people with a very broad brush and in effect, it accepts the most extreme right-wing version of Zionism (aka – Kahanism) peddled by the far right as definitive. This is like accepting the EDL’s definition of Englishness. Or like banning all forms of USA nationalism based on the horrendous crimes of the Trump administration."
• Lighthouses of the World — An animated map showing their rotation speed and brightness. via

A fairly nondescript day. Pottered around a bit and didn’t accidentally start a project, so that’s good. Conserving energy and resting properly. Bit bored though.

Trying not to get wound up about the Zionism-is-racism stuff at the Green Party conference. I have no idea if Zionism is or isn’t racism but I’ve had a look at who’s pushing it and they seem to be exactly the sort of wankers who make progressive and community organising such a fucking ballache to be involved with. In my experience they’re incapable of actually doing anything useful and so hide behind ideological purity tests that drain energy and distract from the real work of bringing people together to make a difference. I dearly hope the Greens' policy processes are robust enough to get them to fuck off.

Other than that, feeling OK.

Today’s links

• A hacker’s guide to bending the universe — A lovely piece of writing from 2016 by Marcin Wichary about how, as a teen desperate to play Civilization, he made a broken CRT monitor usable with a software hack. Contains a nice account of how a CRT works which would go nicely into a collection of “describing a previously ubiquitous thing to someone who’s never experienced it before”. Also explains why old computer games played at lower resolutions, which I never really appreciated before.
• Doomscroll #56: Naomi Klein — A YouTube comment describes this, in I hope a nice way, as “a really heartfelt convo between a mom and her son” and there is a generational aspect to this. I’ve be liking how Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll project is a concerted effort to figure out how to unite the left to defeat the fash and the best episodes, to me, are ones like this where he talks to someone whose been in this fight for a while.
• In Our Time: Casablanca — One of the few films that actually makes this emotionally stunted fool cry so I knew a lot of the mythology and back story. Shame they didn’t pick up on the homoerotic subtext (Renault is totally in love with Rick and totally gets his man at the end) but you can only do so much in these shows. There’s also a lot to be said about how many of the cast and crew were up against the HUAC McCarthyite witch-hunt just years after making this anti-fascist classic, which is barely touched upon. Scratches the surface but if you know nothing this is a great introduction.
• Reissue of the Week: Elastica’s Debut Album is “Untouchable Louche Perfection” — I have fond memories of playing this album over and over though I hadn’t listened to it for a long time. So I dragged it up on the streamer. It’s pretty good, I guess? Bits are amazing but then bits remind me of Kenickie, and not in a great way. I mean, I love Kenickie but for being Kenickie, and Elastica are supposed to be something different? And as the album continued I remembered that while these people looked amazingly cool and sexy they were also arseholes and that whole Britpop / NME Camden scene was a fucking shitshow that needed to die and the only reason I still have a lingering fondness for Elastica is because they released one great album, introduced us to The Wire’s Pink Flag, and then vanished into rehab.

My local park on October 1st

One of my goals as set by the CFS occupational therapist is to go to a social space once a week. I’ve picked The Cloak and Dagger on Stirchley High Street as somewhere familar and quiet enough for an afternoon visit (it used to be my regular in its previous incarnation as The Wildcat) but only managed one visit this summer. Realising I was struggling, chum Roo suggested we meet there, forcing me to commit and not back out unless I absolutely had to, and so today I trundled through the park and spent a nice hour in a pub.

And it was OK. Fun even once I got there. While going to social spaces with CFS is tiring, my being homebound these last couple of years has meant the anticipation of visiting them triggers a significant amount of anxiety, and that anxiety is really exhausting. So while getting used to going out regularly won’t fix my CFS in itself, it will hopefully stop my batteries draining so quickly so I crash less often. That’s the idea anyway.

Machines of Loving Grace

Today’s big read is Erik Davis who dives deep into the origins of the phrase All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. I know it as the title of one of Adam Curtis' video essays which I don’t remember much about as it came out in 2011. I’ve been meaning to do a Curtis rewatch, now I’m older and wiser, but it’s frankly a little daunting. At least when I worked through Jonathan Meades’s filmography they were relatively bitesized. But what is recovery from chronic fatigue if not the perfect time to catch up on very long documentaries.

Anyway, while he spends a few paragraphs on Curtis (“the fascinating and frustrating documentarian”), the main focus is on Richard Brautigan’s original poem from where the phrase came and which is seemingly infused with counterculture optimism about a cybernetic hippy future. That it was most recently used by Dario Modei, one of the insufferable tech bros, to title their “AI is going to save us” manifesto is delicious to Davis who’s pretty sure Brautigan was being ironic.

Irony invites ambiguity, and it is the ambiguity of Brautigan’s poem that has allowed its meanings to slip and slide over the last half century of technological development. The irony of Amodei’s 2024 essay is, then, his utter lack of irony, something not unheard of among engineers, at least in America. (I can say that because I am the child of an excellent American engineer.) I am not talking about Amodei’s refusal to read Brautigan’s own irony, but rather his own lack of irony. When you are offering bold visions of future possibilities, irony reminds everyone, including yourself, that unintended consequences are inevitable.

As always with Davis there are some great lines (“Systems theory created a non-woo way to ‘grok’ the system as a whole — the great big spinning blue marble of it all”) and I find reading him delightful, like being in the presence of a village elder spinning a wild tale. And he injects some fascinating historical titbits, like The Communication Company, “which was basically a mimeograph machine managed by the Diggers, the anarcho-Dadaist street-theatre activists who grew out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe." I love the idea that any weirdo could bring in a sheet of their freaky nonsense and they’d run off copies free of charge to scatter around Haight Ashbury.

Moar linkage:

• Kim Deal: Live At The Barbican trailer ‌(7:20) — I have fond memories of Kim Deal’s 2024 solo album, Nobody Loves You More, but didn’t realise she did a live performance of it with an orchestra at the Barbican — a live album is due out soon. Obviously Kim is one of my heroes but even so I found the trailer — which looks like it’s for a documentary but isn’t, much to my chagrin — utterly endearing and the glimpse of the rehearsal process fascinating.
• Why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong — I think this ties in a bit with Klein and Taylor’s End Times Fascism, their premise being the far right are not the calculating geniuses they promote themselves as, but grifters taking us for fools. It’s certainly the most frustrating thing about Farage et al: beneath the grievance there’s nothing substantive there. This interview with the author of a new book about the success of the Nazi party in 1930 dismisses all the usual explanations leaving just one. “Ever since Hitler had been in the NSDAP, he had talked about one thing: executing his political opponents. And the Nazi party remained absolutely consistent in that respect. In the run-up to the 1930 vote, it didn’t talk about social policy, it didn’t talk about building the autobahn. It just had murder plots. It’s hard to admit this from a modern perspective, but historical fascism’s lust for violence didn’t make it repulsive but extremely attractive to a lot of German voters. I would not say this is something unique to German voters.
• The zero-bills home: how one family is beating the energy price hikes — The burried lede here is it costs £20,000 to install a zero-bills home, but even so this is an interesting look at how it can work.
• A good definition of the fediverse

Colophonic adminstratum:

I discovered today that this blog generates a Photos page which appears to be an archive of all posts which have an image included in them, listed using the image alone. Given the images I use with each post rarely if ever have anything to do with the subsequent topics it’s not a particularly useful navigational aid. But as an overview of the photos I’ve taken for this blog it’s kinda fun, and maybe gives a sense of what it’s like being stuck at home with chronic fatigue with only the garden to entertain me. Or maybe it’s just a lot of rabbit photos.

A quiet day, although I did finally receive a couple of widgets I’d accidentally ordered from China on eBay (hate it when that happens, not so much for the shipping time as for the wrongness feeling of getting something so cheaply from the other side of the fucking world) so I could finish the second stage of the shed water conservation system, connecting the rear butt to the three side butts so all the butts flow into each other. Now I just need a few days of heavy rain…

We watched Once Upon a Time in Space which, as a childhood space nut, I found fascinating as it covered the space stuff that came after my obsession. I was always an Apollo-head and while the Shuttle was cool I wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening through the 90s. This is basically about the space stations, from Mir to the ISS, right up to the present day deterioration of US/Russian collaboration. My biggest takehome was how those involved in the space programmes had to buy into the idealism and utterly suspend any cynicism about why their governments were funding these trips to space, and their disappointment when Realpolitik kicks in is palpable. But before that their accounts of floating in a tin can spinning around the earth are beautiful to behold.

Clearing the tabs

I needed to declare browser bankruptcy so to mark the end of September I posted this bundle of links earlier today. I haven’t read any of them in full but I reckon they might be of interest to what passes for my readership demographic. Click with caution!

• Devon exhibition explores ‘cultural world’ of fungi — Interesting exhibition of artists working with fungi in Exeter.
• Static site generators for beginners — My attempts at building a new website using Eleventy have stalled due to overwhelm with the programming of it all but I’m still keen to figure out a way to DIY this shit. This was a really nice guide written in lovely language that made me feel hopeful again.
• Compost.cc — This isn’t about composting but looks very much in my wheelhouse from an archiving perspective. “Many important cultural archives lack visibility. Some are carefully preserved by archival staff without the knowledge or resources to host digital copies. Others disappear. Institutions lose funding, servers go offline, hard drives fail, political regimes change. When a digital archive depends on a single organization or a single server, it is only as durable as that organization’s budget or that server’s uptime. compost.cc invites people to share in the work of preservation — distributing archives across many machines in many places, maintained by the people who care about them. Our interest is not in decentralization for its own sake, but in collective responsibility: more hands, more resilience, more of a sense for what it takes to keep shared knowledge alive."

I need to declare browser bankruptcy so to mark the end of September here is bundle of links I haven’t read in full but think might be of interest to what passes for my readership demographic. Click with caution and trepidation!

• Britain’s far-right violence comes to us direct from the 1970s. But so does the solution | Taj Ali
• Museum of time-based art - Celebrating artists who commit to long-duration and daily creative practices
• Authoritarian nationalism in the UK’s second city: Birmingham and the conjuncture of Not-Yet-Fascism
• Where To, Brum? A Moan
• On Walter Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)
• Letter from Doggerland - Mapping a Vanished Landscape
• If none of your needs or desires are app-shaped
• What if we just stopped? — Doing social media, that is.
• Slate’s commenters have been trolling my writing for years. I finally asked why. I’ll never look at them the same.
• In praise of occasional staples: James Brown on the age of the zine — yup, that James Brown. When we watched the recent doc on Loaded and the lads mags I was struck by how tight the his continuity was from zines.
• Do Not Answer: Bogna Konior and the Dark Forest of the Internet
• The examined life in the age of optimisation - New York journal of philosophy
• Humanists have done nothing wrong — Good to know.
• Why are rivers so mathematical?
• I Crash: Texts from M.E. — “This post uses my own text messages to give a first-person documentary account of an experience of Long Covid and ME/CFS. I use private messages, sent at different times to different people, as a record of crashes, fluctuating symptoms, relapse, remission, pacing, medical uncertainty, and the struggle to make sense of a poorly understood and poorly supported illness."
• Book review: What Can A Body Do? — This book has been on my long-list of books that I’ll probably never get to so it’s nice to read a decent review and summary.
• A.I. Risk And The End Of The Neoliberal Style In Politics — “You can’t make pragmatic compromises with predatory counterparties."
• Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse — Mentions the seminal text ‌Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, which, not coincidentally, was where I first came across the term ‘teledildonics’. I would not have considered it a radicalising text, but here we are…
• Yes they want to kill us: The worshippers of machines versus human beings — Rebecca Solnit, referencing the above.
• The dark side of mindfulness
• David Graeber: What’s the point if we can’t have fun?
• What if we never built another new building? — One of the surprising things about those campaigning to save Birmingham’s 60s architecture is they’re not necessarily fans of modernism but object to the waste of demolishing perfectly good buildings.
• Neuroplasticity as a praxis — Yeah, me neither. But I think it means we can reprogram our meatbrains by reading books.
• “The ghosts are fast and they don’t turn blue.” — This is about a hacked PacMan game that starts at level 255, so you’re literally thrown in at the deepest end. I had it in my tabs as an example of how I was feeling trying to build a website with Eleventy last month.
• ‘I love provocative stories’: producer Christine Vachon on fighting for her ‘offensive’ movies
• How much dark money is in professional philosophy? — I think this is about far-right dark-enlightenment infiltration of Cambridge Uni.
• Listen. Believe. Do No Harm. — “An occupational therapist’s guidance for caring well for people with severe ME/CFS”
• The End of History and the Final Girl
• There Is No Atmospheric Exemption for British Oil and Gas

Lavander goes through phases of digging and we’re happy to encourage it. Then we fill in the hole so she can start over again.

Psychotherapy day today, alongside a need to rest, so mostly pottering in the garden. Sister came over to borrow something from the shed so we had a brief catch-up. I mentioned my therapy had moved onto some quite specific family stuff and she reacted in a way I couldn’t quite pin down, so I guess a chat is on the horizon!

A friend with Long-Covid emailed about my CFS crashes, wondering if it might be better if I never crashed at all. I think it would! But then I wouldn’t do anything, and the process I’m following is to slowly try and find that point where I can function but not crash. This is not as easy as it might be because I’m not very good at monitoring.

In fact in many ways I’m a terrible CFS patient. When I’m fatigued I make bad decisions which make me feel worse, and when I’m restored I want to seize the moment and finally get something done, which is often also a bad decision. Except when it’s not. And all of this is impossible to judge causally. I’ve had crashes that clearly came from a specific activity and I’ve had crashes that seemed to come out of nowhere.

So yeah, I’m aiming for no crashes, but I also have to be cognisant my personality and what I’m realising is a 50 year habit of boom and bust. (Yes, I’m on an ADHD assessment waiting list.)

Today’s linkage

• Andy Burnham addresses Labour party conference (1hr-ish) — I wasn’t expecting to watch this all the way through and really wasn’t expecting to be impressed. Just goes to show how rare it is for a politician to give a really good speech. A couple of eyebrow raisers (a working class AI industrial revolution?) and he now needs to deal with the vested interests, but the commitment to electoral reform was really good to see and fuck me but he made me feel a tingle of hope. I’m sure it’ll be tempered and I’ll be fighting back the disappointment, but for now I’ll take it.
  • Dunt gives a thorough summary and is fairly happy.
• How do you solve a problem like the paywall? — A view into what it’s like to write something that is published behind a paywall and then promoted on social media, where everyone responds to the headline and no-one clicks through for the substance they spent weeks working on. Over the last few months I’ve been following a handful political types on BlueSky whose writing I enjoy and it’s been fascinating seeing how they and their followers behave online. The best way I can describe it is ‘angry people shouting at screenshots of headlines they dislike’. From a context-collapse perspective it’s actually quite terrifying.
• Compost and the climate — Nice piece by Cass about how composting can help the climate crisis. It’s somewhat counterintuitive that one of the worst things to go into a municipal landfill is organic matter. Surely it’ll decompose and vanish? Yeah, but in a sealed up landfill it’ll emit a staggering amount of methane which is way worse for the climate. Which is why it’s best to remove all food and garden waste from the stream before processing it. Organic matter should go to a composting site where it can decompose aerobically producing some CO2 and locking the rest in as plant food. (Or you can decompose it anaerobically and capture the methane to burn it as fuel. Just don’t let it leach into the air.)
• Thanks LMG!

Nothing much to report today. Bit of a fuzzy head so a rest day, all in all.

Not overly happy with my link-notes below. Can’t seem to get the phrasing right, but also my judgement might be off and it’s all fine actually. I will publish and be damned.

• 🎶 John McCowen - Pressure Chords feat. Lucy Railton, Weston Olencki (Full album is on subscription streamers) — Came across this while listening to a new-to-me Radio 3 show, Unclassified, for new composers who haven’t found a niche. It’s a bit hit and miss but good for finding something a bit different. This caught my ear due to the long pauses between notes where you can hear the performers breathing, and as a trombonist in a previous life I appreciated the impossibility of cleanly starting a quiet note on that damned instrument. But I’m mainly posting it because this morning I accidentally started playing the album on my phone and spent 10 minutes wandering around the house and garden trying to figure out where that darn noise was coming from. It was only when Fi said it was following me that I clocked.
• Are Reddit Boys’ struggle apartments actually the future of design? — I found this meditation on the photos from r/malelivingspace fascinating as I would never have lived as minimalisticly as this as a single man in the 90s and 2000s. I essentially lived in a storage unit with rooms built around my stuff which I carted from home to home. The idea of living without possessions would have been aspirational and utterly unrealistic. Obviously I couldn’t afford my own place, so we’re talking a room in a shared house, not an apartment, and maybe that voids my observations. Maybe men did live like this if they had the means. via
• Historic England’s vanishing archive — This is framed as a DRM failure, of favouring copyright protection over access, which it is, but I think it’s emblematic of a bigger issue which which has been building over the last decade. A couple of decades back, as the technology matured, heritage institutions started digitising their archives. Presuming they didn’t then dispose of the originals this was generally a good thing but it was funded on the assumption that this digitisation would increase public access. The weak point in this is that access was usually done through a website, and institutions often do not take their websites seriously. Yesterday when I posted about the Snow film I noticed there were a number of links in the YouTube description to BFI websites. The first link to the DVD went 404-not-found, while the second, “for more information about Snow” didn’t resolve until I hacked the url to remove the s from https, and then it’s like going back in time. The issue, I think, is that organisations like the BFI do not consider their websites to be part of their archive. They’re at best temporary exhibitions and at worst publicity vehicles. Sure, the archive itself is safe, but online access to it is temporary, vulnerable to the next branding or funding overhaul.
• Meet the real AI “rogue agent”: Lord Tom Watson — Carole Cadwalladr expresses disappointment in an old ally in her inimitable way.
• Schopenhauer’s half-empty glass

So yeah, it’s been a week since I last posted. I had a major chronic fatigue crash on the 19th, the likes of which I haven’t experienced for a long time, maybe since Christmas? It wasn’t nice and I don’t really feel the need to revisit it now but suffice to say it took a while to get over.

I’m still feel a bit on the edge of exhaustion but I appear to have fleshed out my notes about some links today, with a degree of verbosity that resembles the bursting of a festering boil of thought-juice, so something is clearly better.

John Wilson on his unlikely concrete movie

Obviously his new film looks great and I’m looking forward to it. I was struck though by his struggles to get it made, which reminded me of my own issues as an artist: the catch-22 of getting funding for something you haven’t made yet from people who want to know what you’re going to make.

I want to try, and then experiment and get lost along the way as I usually do.

I remember thinking, while putting together Arts Council applications back in the day, that my dream would be for them to just give me a lump of cash to live off while I just noodled around to see what emerged. On paper this is an outrageous way to spend public money, but it’s also how the creative process works. I never knew what I was making until I made it, and I could never retrace those steps to make something new.

That said, I did have that experience once, on a residency in Austria where I was given a studio, a thousand Euro and a month to do whatever I wanted around a theme, which would then be exhibited. When I asked what they were expecting I was told someone on this programme once drew a single line on a wall, so there wasn’t really a low-end of effort required. That was incredibly freeing and I produced work I’m still pretty proud of.

The show’s digressive style “wasn’t a shtick. This is how I think. I just think this is the right way to do things. I like essay films, I like shooting things from my perspective.”

I get the feeling Wilson was slightly protected while at HBO by people who knew he needed to be left alone to noodle. The role of protecting artists from the world is an underrated one.

As he hits 90, master minimalist Steve Reich looks back

As you’ll know I’ve been having something of a Steve Reich moment recently so I was delighted to see he’s not only still alive but comes over as a perfectly decent bloke.

A darkly funny thing happened while I was listening to his work on shuffle. Different Trains: Europe — During the war came on and I realised this is what my brain feels like. The sludgy paradiddles at the start that feel like they’re barely holding time — that’s what I do with my jaw. I find it impossible to describe this stuff so to find it realised in music was mildly euphoric. I can point to it and say this, this is what it’s like inside my head!

And then I looked up Different Trains to find out more about it.

During World War II, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been traveling in Holocaust trains.

So, the piece of music that most resembles my inner brain noises is about the Holocaust.

• See also, Steve Reich at 80.

The Soviets drilled the deepest hole ever

As shown on that XKCD a while back. Say what you like about Soviet Russia, the drive to do things for the glory of Lenin certainly got results where capitalism faltered, and in this case discovered fascinating things about the earth’s crust.

To anyone who thought they knew granite, that sounded ridiculous. Granite is supposed to fracture. Hit it with enough force and it breaks into chips that a drill can carry away. But nearly 8 miles beneath the Kola Peninsula, the rock had crossed some bizarre invisible threshold. Instead of shattering, it slowly deformed. As soon as the drill bit passed, Nestrenko explained, the surrounding granite began creeping back toward the borehole, squeezing the shaft shut almost as quickly as the engineers could deepen it. Every trip to replace a worn drill bit gave the Earth another opportunity to reclaim the hole they had just created.

“It would pinch the hole closed,” Nestrenko recalled. “When we pulled the drill string back, the rock flowed inward.” The engineers had reached the limits of drilling. The rock simply no longer behaved like rock.

Moar links:

• George Mombiot: Abandoned, dismissed and gaslighted: there is no excuse for the way ME sufferers have been betrayed — Lots to take home from this characteristically comprehensive litany of problems. For me it was a reassuring read as my NHS treatment for chronic fatigue is not based on graded exercise. The chronic fatigue service in Birmingham follow the NICE guidance and while the waiting period was too long and potentially hurtful in itself, I’m grateful my GP quickly put me on the list and didn’t try any treatments that might have been damaging.
• Snow (1963) by Geoffrey Jones for British Transport Films — A delightful short film ‌(7:46) showing how railway workers dealt with the immense amount of snow the fell in 1963 to keep the railways going. The very existence of this sort of film is fascinating from today’s perspective. Why were these things made? Where were they shown? What was the rationale? I have my own ideas — something about lifting the veil on the work that went on behind the scenes giving the British consumer (not that they would have been called that then) an appreciation of what was involved in getting the trains running. And I’d imagine they would have been shown in cinemas before the main feature, or filling a gap on the BBC. The strong emphasis on the worker is interesting too, and the shot of the two men’s arms, one black, one white, working together to turn a big screw at 4:58 seems very notable given the time. Nominated for an Academy Award, no less.
• John Harris: Labour is nostalgic for two-party politics. That cosy, simple time is over – let it go — It occurred to me reading this that I’m now a swing voter. Depending on candidate, party manifesto and, let’s be honest, vibes I’m as likely to vote Green as Labour. I’ve never been a swing voter before, especially in this previously safe Labour seat. It’s oddly refreshing and not a little confusing to be this enfranchised.
• Why UK conspiracy theorists are destroying traffic scanners — A decade or so back Fi and I were involved in a bit of data privacy advocacy, helping people understand what was going on with their devices and information online. Fi went as far as to work at The Glass Room, an installation in London run by Mozilla. One thing I remember coming up was how wrong people were about what their phone was doing, specifically about recording what they were saying and then showing them ads about it. This is classic correlation does not imply causation stuff, along with a chunk of confirmation bias, and it really showed me how the most nonsensical ideas can fester in a critical thinking vacuum. If you don’t know how to understand what’s going on with the cameras sitting on the traffic lights in your neighbourhood then they might as well be “phased array electronic assault weapons”
  • The current panic is about smart TV’s listening recording conversations and while I would never buy one of those devices let alone connect it to the internet I guarantee you the dominant ideas as to what they’re doing are bullshit.
• 🎶 Ensemble Offspring - Songbirds — I’m utterly torn as to whether this album of compositions mimicking birdsong is cheesy or profound. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Didn’t sleep too well, pretty tired today. This has definitely been a recovery week.

What ME/CFS is, and how it’s wrecking me ‌(30:36)

Of all the people I’ve seen talking about their chronic fatigue this is probably the closest to my experience, though everyone has it different and there are plenty of things that don’t match. Definitely worth watching if you want a rough sense of what I’m going through.

The biggest issue for me has always been how boring my life now is. I decided a year ago I wouldn’t let that stop me recording my CFS life here because it’s too easy for people in my situation to become invisible (the total silence from politicians about Long Covid has been somewhat horrifying) but I am very aware that those bits at the top of each entry can get a bit relentlessly monotonous.

I’m slightly intrigued by this notion that I might have always had it in a mild form and it just recently became disabling thanks to the triple whammy of Covid, stress and grief, but I’m taking that with a pinch of salt because so little is known about CFS that it’s a fertile ground for speculation and straw-grasping.

That said, I remember in my 20s someone asking me how I was and I replied “tired” to which he snapped back “you’re always tired” implying he was sick of hearing it. I hadn’t realised I did this and have made a concerted effort since not to tell the truth when people ask how I am (this overlaps with autism, of course!) but yeah, now I think about it I’ve always been tired. And it’s always been boring.

Linky links

• Pearl: The new new wave of anti-heroes ‌(15:08) — Grace Lee is back with her first video essay in ages, and it’s a good one, using the Mia Goth horror movie to unpick 50 years of anti-heroes.
  • Her back catalogue is well worth exploring but I think my favourite quintessential Grace Lee video would be Car Parks: What do they mean? Do they mean things?! Let’s find out!
• British journalism and polling are both utterly implicated in the Farage funding scandal — Dunt goes deep with some interesting insights into how the polling industry works.
• The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism — “The Battle of Legitimate Concerns."
• The cartographers who took on centuries of western bias — The story of how the UN accepted the Equal Earth projection. The lesson here to me is that there’s no perfect flat map and each projection has specific uses. I’m sure people who actually depend on flat maps switch between them all the time. Do scroll to the end for Hao Xiaoguang’s wonderful projection which looks to me like an exploded Pangea. I’d love a poster of that.
• Tom Watson joins Palantir — I try not to get too wound up by this sort of thing but I used to like Watson. He was one of the first politicians to blog back in the day and as a local MP would come to various tech meetups. His work on Digital Economy Act and the Murdoch phone hacking scandal was admirable and it felt like he was one of us. I even voted for him as deputy leader, in the vain and idiotic hope that a Corbyn/Watson led party could unite the Labour party. Never making that mistake again. I guess that period ground out whatever I liked about him as he’s been turning to the dark side ever since. A shame.
• W/ Dude — Following links during a Wikitok scroll I found myself wondering about the origin of the term “dude” and it’s pretty fascinating. A dude was a fancy guy from the city with great clothes, which makes me wonder if it’s also the origin of the word duds.
• 🎶 Before and Afterlife by Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang and David Sylvian — Came up on Night Tracks and totally sucked me in. Delicious mix of trumpet, samples and spoken word. Here’s a nice long blog post about it.
• 🎶 Sugar on Blackstone by Kristin Hersh — New solo album just dropped. We’re going to see her play at All Saint’s Church, Kings Heath next Saturday so best swot up on these tracks.

The rabbit lawn. The fenced off area at the front is growing and will be swapped with to the rear once it’s tall enough to eat.

More pottering today, though I appear to have accidentally gestated a couple of plans so I guess my brain is over the fatigue?

The first is to extend the water harvesting to the shed roof and pipe it to the existing rabbit-run roof system. This was always the plan but I was going to put this off til much later. Today I realised it would actually be quite simple and cheap, and that I have most of the bits, so am looking forward to getting that done next week.

The other plan is a potential collaboration with someone else, so I need to run it by them first and see if they’re even interested, but it might resolve a few stumbling blocks I’ve been having with writing and give me a project to focus on for the next year or so. I’d articulated it out loud to Fiona and it doesn’t seem totally stupid so fingers crossed they’re interested.

Hard parties, cheap rents and horrible flats: how 90s art and fashion redefined British culture

I try to avoid Miranda Sawyer’s skewed historicising of my 20s decade but this is a particularly egregious example and fuck it, I’ll bite. My memory, such as it is of that time, is of a load of interesting things going on that would occasionally get swooped upon by cool-hunters and ruined through over-exposure, so you had to keep digging deeper. This is not necessarily a bad thing, being pushed further into the weird to find something they couldn’t co-opt, but let’s not let those wankers write the record, please?

Of course she’s not talking about the whole of the 1990s. She’s talking about a very specific scene with very specific people whose experiences do not scale to the rest of us, so it’s clearly going to be very annoying to anyone who was producing ‘culture’ back then.

While I was stewing on this, and beginning to regret writing the above, I started thinking about my zine collection which, thanks to my putting it online for a brief period, got a tiny bit of attention. People think of zines as being cool, but the truth is most of them were not very good. They were produced by normal awkward people with limited means, most of whom hadn’t done this sort of thing before, and that’s what made them exciting and important to me. As a cultural movement they’re fascinating but as cultural items they tend to be underwhelming. Just like blogging, or digital photography, or anything that gave the means of production to the masses.

The great Scottish underground cartoonist John Miller, who is unlikely to suffer a retrospective at Tate Modern, had a line in his comics about his childhood: “the sixties never made it to Lanarkshire.” That’s not to say those years weren’t revolutionary and exciting on their own terms.

Yeah, I’m regretting writing this. What even is my point? Go read the John Miller stuff and make it worthwhile.

• Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner — Folks who’ve followed my lens-based art nonsense will know I’ve long had a passion for slit-scan photography (you may have suffered me trying to explain how slit-scan swaps the X axis of a photo with it’s motion through time, like if time is the fourth dimension and we’ve removed depth and width from that to produce a 2D image, and that this is really interesting, honest) so this was like catnip to me. It’s a proper nerdy deep-dive into calibrating the camera to produce good-enough images and by the end I had a bit of a headache, but it’s fantastic to see someone doing this work. via
• A Movie and Everywhere at Once — I got a lot out of these two short collage films, shared by John Coulthard, one from 1958 and the other 1985. They both seem to be attempts to deal with the enormity of footage produced in their respective eras, but go further, using music to draw out the comedy and horror of the juxtapositions.
• Jordan Crane in conversation with Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez
• MacOS 27 doesn’t look too shit? — I might even finally upgrade from 18, which I’m happy with but it’s getting a bit buggy. via
• Two upcoming books of note with lovely covers: Ed Yong’s Life Beyond Measure and Mike Parker’s Mid Land: A Journey into England’s Heart. (The latter asked me for a cover photo but went with a much better choice.)
• A wildlife allotment wins Gardeners' World magazines' best of the best award — I actually follow Nadine on Mastodon, so this was a nice surprise!
• Wonder Woman as painted by Picasso as drawn by Darryl Cunningham.

Rest day, mostly pottering in the garden and making the finishing tweaks to the rabbit run water harvesting system. I’m happy that it’s now good enough to run through the winter and save up enough water to get the lawn through the next drought. Why do we care about the lawn? Because it’s rabbit food!

• RIP Joe Holyoak — I met him a couple of times at Birmingham walking events and he was always a lovely and generous presence with a great moustache.
• Horse piss and dirty honey: on the more-than-human in (and beyond) Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble — It seems I can be forgiven for not managing to read Staying with the Trouble given it’s an academic text that assumes deep knowledge of what it refers to, but I remain fascinated by the headlines and am grateful to Paul for giving us an in to this concept of the more-than-human.
• Amazon to launch Ring ‘neighbourhood watch’ app in UK — There are two kinds of people on the street chat group. Those who have networked spycam doorbells and those who think those people should chill out, man. With any luck this dystopian sounding app will become a place the former can go and be paranoid together while the rest of us can get on with building community around important stuff like sharing tools and giving away random junk from our cupboards.
  • My deep fryer lives in a tool polycule. Here’s how to stop buying things your friends already own. — I mean, this is basically our street chat, but I do like the idea of formalising it just a little. And “tool polycule” is simply delightful.
• The early funny stuff — Tom asked what is the earliest piece of media you find intentionally very funny with an emphasis on very and intentionally meaning you laugh for the right reasons. Being woefully ignorant of anything pre-20th century I had to say Marx Bros movies but the resulting list goes back much further than I’d expect.
• Your Grandad Cyclops talks about his school days ‌(2:15) — What if… the X-men were based in Belfast.

Ideally this would have been a rest day but Tuesday is psychotherapy day so no rest just yet. The session went well but afterwards it was clear my battery was exhausted and I got a bit stress triggered by a couple of thoughts sending me into a brain spiral. The annoying thing is I know how to stop these — the trusty box breathing exercise — but when I’m in a spiral it’s the last thing on my mind. Eventually I’ll train myself to recognise the symptoms in the moment and do the right thing, just as I recognise tinnitus as a signal to stop and rest, but not just yet.

I have nothing in my diary for a week or so now and am hoping to get back to my routine of pottering around the house and blogging. The last couple of weeks, while lovely in places, have felt a bit non-stop doing and recovering and I need some time to just be myself at a more healthy pace. And recognising this is a damn fine piece of progress, I must say.

• Every US electrical outlet explained ‌(21:32) — Being from the UK, where we have one type of plug and then another bigger one if you’re in a factory and need 3-phase, this was mind-boggling.
• Stories from Senegal — A nice long post from my friends who are cycling through Africa at the moment.
• 🎶 Aster, atlas by Sara Parkman — The Supersonic newsletter let me know she’s playing Birmingham in January and I was intrigued. Liking what I hear so far.

Rest day, and much needed. Lots of sleeping, not much doing.

The end times fascists are plotting their escape from our world. Our mission is clear.

An excerpt from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book which is out tomorrow. I’ll be getting the audiobook.

I was pleased to see this excerpt is not just outlining all the terrible things but touches on some of what we can do about it. This has been my big thing as we face up to these forces of darkness — what can we do to resist and ultimately defeat them?

Start from love of place, then conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives, embrace common goals across difference, get outside and gather offline and in person, take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.

This fits with everything I’ve been reading and is, I think, why the fascist flaggers hit their first real resistance in Birmingham when they came through my home of Stirchley where we’ve been doing this sort of work for years now. It’s not going to be easy but it can be done.

• Guardian review of the book

A reading of the Bayeux Tapestry

Like most things that are incredibly familiar I realised I couldn’t tell you exactly what the Bayeux Tapestry depicted so this hour long account was welcome. What’s particularly striking to this comics-head is how much it obeys what we now call comic book grammar to the point where chronological flow can be reversed and still make sense.

The video uses a 19th century copy of the tapestry by Charles Stothard rather than photographs of the tapestry as it currently it, which might seem odd as high resolution images are on Wikimedia in the public domain (in two parts), but this has some real value as it shows how it was before the restoration, which I didn’t realise was quite substantial.

The story itself is actually surprisingly short on details, given the scale of the thing, and I imagine it would have accompanied an aural storytelling tradition, like slides with a presentation. You can picture someone moving around the room spending a decent amount of time beneath each scene fleshing it out with colourful facts that got stretched with each telling.

On a personal note, I’ve actually seen the tapestry in the flesh, albeit as a child when we went on holiday to France on the 1980s and stopped off at Bayeux. I remember it being hung behind glass in a room half its length so it doubled back something they’re not doing in the London display due to fragility. I don’t remember much more but we did take home a fold-out reproduction which I still have upstairs somewhere. Because it’s a comic, and I collected comics. I should dig it out really.

• Richard Littler, of Scarfolk fame, started a recreation of the tapestry using Yellow Submarine characters before “a voice in my brain intervened and screamed, ‘What in god’s name are you doing?'"

The view from my bench

Today was the Birmingham Honey Show at Winterbourne Gardens, which means Winterbourne Gardens is free entry and also there’s honey. Plus one of my Birmingham-based cousins developed a beekeeping habit during the lockdowns and enters his honey in competition, so it’s become a defacto family gathering, especially now my sister is in town.

I probably shouldn’t have gone, given I was still recovering from Friday, but I’d enjoyed it in the past so figured we’d give it a go. Turned out to be way busier than I remembered and I struggled, to be honest, spending most of the hour we were in attendance lying on a bench with earplugs in and my cap over my eyes. At least I got to briefly touch base with the cousins and arrange for a more chilled catch-up another time.

• Gloria Steinem’s final essay 🪜 — Two quotes jumped out to me. “Words that stand for equality are demonized by those who benefit from inequality." and “When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come."
• The young Welsh farmers growing food for Birmingham — Great to see the problem of access to land being addressed, and I particularly like how this project is trying to bypass the middle class veg boxes market and actually do something socially useful with the produce. But sidebar, is it me or do these young farmers look especially young? But then I was convinced this week’s Guardian Blind Date couple were in their late teens, and all my ‘young’ friends, who still look young to me, are turning 40, so what do I know.
• The £150bn megaproject that aims to protect Britain from energy shocks — A detailed overview of the upgrades needed for our electricity grid, something that should have been started years ago and is destined to become another tedious political battleground. Really good to see it all laid out like this.
• Canonizing Pope: The case for THB — I remember finding a copy of THB #1 in a comic shop in 1994 and it being a big deal, like someone exciting had just parachuted in with something we’d not seen before, a supercool exoticism that Pope was happy to push (to increasingly annoying effect). I’m not sure the actual THB story itself will hold up (schoolgirls on Mars? Really?) but I’ll probably revisit it when the final volume appears this December.
• 🎶 Half-Told Tales by Arab Strap — I’m really enjoying this second coming of Aidan and Malcolm, having been a big fan since hearing The First Big Weekend on the radio 30 years ago. Very much appreciate how they’ve avoided becoming a heritage act and are making important, essential work that merges their gloomy introspection with Sleaford Mods-style commentary. A few tracks on this album make me feel seen.

Banana time is when the rabbits show they love me.

Very much a rest day today. Was hoping to pop along to the Woodland Games but nope, no energy available.

Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’

New book (written with Astra Taylor) incoming. Ever since No Logo, Klein has had this uncanny ability to take the disparate threads of whatever I’ve been thinking about and arrange them in a coherent manner, something that my brain is very grateful for. This book is titled End Times Fascism and looks like it follows the seemingly bonkers shit Peter Thiel believes and ties it in to long-term authoritarian trends.

In End Times Fascism, Klein and Taylor raise Walter Benjamin’s concept “jetztzeit”, literally “now time”, a moment so pregnant with the spirit, the urgency of revolution that it marshals the energy of all movements that went before it. Again, it’s poetic, but it’s also literal, observable. If we want to oppose this new fascist strain, we really have to get a move on. “I don’t tend to use this language, I try to be measured, but I think I’ve earned the right to escalate,” she says. “The moment we’re in, people are really mad and however mad you are, it’s not enough. Because there is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They’re traitors to creation.”

• Adam Savage experiences anatomically correct wings — These are quite spectacular, particularly they way they open when she pushes her arms back. I’m also really appreciative of how Savage has established his ‘elder’ role in the maker scene, being actively supportive of the next generations and never weird or creepy about it. Obviously someone’s screen persona is not who they are, and we’ve been milkshake ducked many times before, but I get a real sense he’s a good person and in many ways a role model for those of us oldies that want to help those following us.
• Unsung: Behind the scenes — I’m a sucker for how people manage their blogging so I enjoyed this insight into how Marcin Wichary finds and choses subjects, drafts posts and publishes them. Fascinating to see he does most it in Apple Notes which I wrote off as a piece of fluff years ago but which has presumably gotten more powerful.
• Running a personal website is not fun anymore — I’ve been through this a few times over the years but I always come back to wanting to control the whole means of production. Must be a zinester thing.

We went on a relatively big adventure today, driving out to Compton Verney with my sister and bro-in-law. I think it’s the furthest I’ve been since December? Fi gave me loads of opportunities to bail before and on the way there but I made it and was delighted to discover they have a “tramper” mobility vehicle to hire for a fiver, so I was able to traverse all the grounds without fear of fatigue. Total game changer.

The house itself, which is basically an art gallery, was a little aurally overwhelming so I stayed out in the gardens while the others had a visit, slowly puttering around and taking photos.

All my photos from today are in this post.

Today would have been my mum’s 80th and it was good to have spent it at the sort of place she would have liked visiting. Although to be honest I didn’t realise today was the 11th until we were leaving. This is fine though as we’d long reconciled ourselves to my always forgetting it was her birthday. It would have been wrong to have remembered.

I was pretty nervous about today. Fi gave me plenty of escape routes and we could have left at any time, but once I had my chunky scooter and the freedom to get away from any obligations, I was fine.

Once returning home I realised I was pretty wiped. Strong tinnitus and a papery desiccated feeling, which I haven’t felt in a while. So while it was good to get out and be normal, I now have to be careful for a bit and rest.

A bee’s-eye view: art installation beside the Thames celebrates crucial pollinators

When the pandemic came along in 2020 one of the paths I was on was to do camera obscuras in Birmingham again (after my previous work with Jenny Duffin). I had a couple of projects lined up, one with the Flatpack film festival that would have been pretty spectacular had we pulled it off, and a bunch of ideas, all of which got crushed by lockdown and then erased by my post-Covid chronic fatigue. One of the ideas was quite similar to this installation — an array of small camera obscura that resemble the inside of an insect’s eye — so it’s great to see it realised here by Luke Jerram. I wish I could get down there to see it.

The beauty of this kind of mini-obscura is you can make them with ordinary magnifying glasses which have a throw of about 20cm. The trick is to fabricate the screens in an aesthetically pleasing way, which is what Jerram has nicely achieved with these semi-opaque ballon shapes. My prototypes used tracing paper, which works and gives a nice textured finish, but is hard to manipulate smoothly.

I still have a box of plastic magnifying glasses and a big roll of tracing paper upstairs. If anyone in Birmingham fancies building a crappier (or not!) version of this, and is prepared to do all the actual work while I sit in a chair and give advice, hit me up.

• Why holding a placard is a terrorist act, while causing disruption in a balaclava is not — I was hoping this would go into more detail about how this situation came about, but it’s a good, if brief, start.
• Fantastic interview with a long-distance swimmer who just broke a record
• Kottke on the move — Our boy has left Vermont and is travelling the world (while still blogging).
• The Nerd Reich — No idea if this blog about “the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley plutocrats” is any good but you have to give a big round of applause for coming up with that title.
• Jez’s August linkfarm

Clicken to embiggen.

Because I went out on the scooter here’s a photo of the park for September. The grass is back. Remarkable how quickly it recovered from drought.

Made it out to the hardware store on my wee scooter, the first time it’s been out for quite a while. (My goal is to go out weekly…) Managed to get there, ask a guy about plumbing tape, buy it and leave without any cognitive problems, so that’s a win. Did have to have a break in the park on the way back though.

Of course having got the thing I needed to finish the water harvesting complex I then had to finish the water harvesting complex, which I did. No more leaks! And Fi helped me move the two overflow butts back to the side of the rabbit run which I then connected to the main butt (pictured) and so from tonight we start collecting aqua. Fingers crossed it continues to not leak.

Along with the two butts hidden beside the run, this setup will hold about 650 litres of rain water ready for the next drought.

I’m going to miss writing about butts.

Since getting over the crash on Tuesday I’ve been feeling quite limited in my capacity. I can do little things for a few minutes and then I get the fatigue warnings. The battery is able to be charged but only just above empty. I seem to remember this happened last time — I need a good week to fully restore.

Today’s links

• The ‘gay mole’ who fought the BBC to show the first queer kiss on kids’ TV — Huh, I had no idea about this. Government-led homophobia in the 80s seems insane from today’s perspective. How quickly we forget how awful the past was, and how easy it would be to go back.
• The $50 water turbine (54:27) — This is an edit of a few process videos so I’d seen most of it before. How he makes an electricity generating device from drain-pipes and junk motors is fascinating. Whether this sort of thing is a viable solution to energy poverty I’m not qualified to say.
• UK disabled people could swap Pip cash for ‘in kind’ support in benefit overhaul — They asked actual disabled people who actually get the benefit, which is refreshing.
• Two part interview with Richard Bruning — He was design director at DC comics from the mid-80s and was involved in a bunch of things that defined comics for my generation, so this is interesting, if you’re my generation of comics nerd (post-Watchmen, pre-Vertigo).

Had a visit from my sister this afternoon which was very welcome. It would have been our mum’s 80th birthday this week so we’re going to try and spend a bit of time with all the family photos she kept, which I currently have in boxes upstairs.

Took delivery of some tubes and clips for the water butt project and spent a couple of hours fitting them to see if they leak. Happy to say the tubes and clips fit perfectly, but there’s still a teeny tiny leak from one of the fittings. So I’m planning to go to the hardware store tomorrow and get some plumbing tape and see if that does it. Otherwise we’re so very nearly there.

Today’s links:

• The 101 plays itself — Taking live footage from a static traffic webcam and turning the visual patterns into music. I’ve seen similar things over the years, one particularly notable one taking footage of birds on telegraph wires and transcoding it to a modified piano. This is a particularly neat version producing a soundtrack that I don’t mind playing in the background, albeit based on a rather ugly scene.
• Statement from RNLI Chief Executive Peter Sparkes — “The RNLI’s people represent the very best in our society, they selflessly give up their time to keep others safe. Yet they and their families are being threatened by those who would hide behind a balaclava or a keyboard."
• European Prize for Urban Public Space’s shortlist highlighting projects helping people cope with climate crisis
• Everything finally clicks for man after getting diagnosed as stupid — ‌Area dullard now has name for lifelong condition.
• 🎶 Elle Cordova is the very model of modern day typographer ‌(3:02) — Absolutely astounding work.

Psychotherapy today, which took up all of my energies really, so the rest of the day was mooching and pottering. Feeling much better though so the crash is over. Going to cautiously resume engagement with the wider world from tomorrow.

Therapy got onto my undiagnosed ADHD, specifically hyperfocus, which we talked about today. It helped explain a few things that have happened in the past and certain patterns on behaviour that have become more pronounced with the chronic fatigue. Like how I’ve utterly failed to get an exercise regime in place since fucking my back — something that is important to stop me being in pain again — but am able to think through a water harvesting system for the rabbit run — a thing that would be nice to have but is definitely not necessary. What’s that all about?

As with all these things it’s not so much about wanting the label as benefiting from models of thinking about how I function (or don’t) in new ways that help me do it better. The big advantage of these models is they come with pathways to manage and overcome them, and they’re often worth a look. Assuming I can focus on them of course.

(I’m on the waiting list for an ADHD assessment but don’t expect it any time soon, and to be honest don’t really need one as I doubt I’d get much support unless I went back to education, which is unlikely to happen!)

Slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence

I’ve been kinda interested in slime moulds since my composting obsession started, but only really in the sense that they appear as part of the decomposition process. Their ‘intelligence’ or otherwise was just a curiosity. This is a great look at the scientific furore around non-human consciousness, specifically assigning those concepts to plants (although slime moulds are neither plants nor fungi), and what that means for the usefulness of those concepts. Loads of great quotes from both sides, and makes the discussions around whether computer programs can think look totally asinine.

Trying to capture the endless nuance of life on Earth with our clumsy words is like recreating the Pantone colour catalogue with three crayons. Worse still, words bear different meanings at different times and to different people; it’s as though no one can even agree on what shades the three crayons are. In 2009, three Berkeley researchers surveyed 174 members of scientific societies devoted to the study of animal behaviour, to ask them what “behaviour” is. They received more than 25 distinct definitions and 100 other edge cases. In their headline, the researchers concluded: “Behavioural biologists do not agree on what constitutes behaviour.”

• Urban planner recreates a typical car-centric suburb in a town planning simulator (25:55) — Shows why they’re built the way they are and why that’s a massive problem. My sister’s family lived in a sprawl like this in Auckland and it’s surprisingly accurate, right down to the lack of apartments and the congested road bridge to downtown.
  • Urban planner tries to fix said typical suburb ‌(42:55)
• This was the best kākāpō fuck season ever — A remarkable year for the rotund green parrot that evolution has “precisely calibrated to go extinct”.