Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

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”.

Another rest day. Had a go at fiddling with the water butts and quickly got prickly sweat on my forehead despite doing fuckall really, so hit that on the head.

Have mostly been watching the tellyshows, mainlining Silo season 3 which is teetering on the edge of nonsense but just about holding it together. It’s easy to forgive any implausibilities once you get over the fact that a population of humans that’s been isolated in an underground bunker for 300+ years speaks with a variety of accents and has incredibly good skin, but even so they keep pushing things right to the edge. And I’m there every step.

I’m also watching, with Fiona, the second season of Beef which is enjoyable in a “awful people doing stupid things” sense. Cailee Spaeny is the main draw here. She’d got on my radar in Civil War and Alien Romulus and I’ve been wanting to see if she’s actually as good as those promised. Happy to say she is. Proper acting.

Tonight, though, is quiz night. Bring on the nerds.

• I had an amazing experience as a disabled person at school in the 70s. Since then, discrimination has got far worse — I’m still homebound enough to have not encountered this yet but I’m sure I will. Shiver.
• An appreciation of the Dymaxion map projection — to mark the usurping of Mercator this week.
• 70 Up is out this month — The most fascinating thing about this series, for me, is the feedback loop between the broadcasts and the subjects' lives. A cautionary lesson in many ways that we neglected to learn
• The Horny Universe Theory

Nope, nothing happening today. Still crashed. Recovery in progress.

After the government announced that citizens of the UK should start stocking up on food and water for emergencies, like that’s a normal thing to announce, a couple of people I follow posted level headed guides on what to do with this information:

• Disaster prep for people who aren’t gun-obsessed misanthropes — Jules focusses mostly on water treatment.
• Household food resilience (UK plant-based edition) — Paul looks at food you can hold in deep stock and how to manage that.

Obviously this stuff is best done as a community with many hands, etc, rather than lone people in bunkers, but you have to start somewhere.

Nekh sow - a collection of Senegalese cow murals

A delightful thing to wake up to this morning. This one is clearly my favourite, for reasons that I shouldn’t need to go into with anyone who knows me.

And lo, the chronic fatigue crash did finally come. All the usual bullshit — tired, impatient, sore, grumpy, irritable, aching, fuzzy head, can’t read, can’t think. It’ll pass, it always does.

Was doing my box breathing (the only thing that helps) and Fi said I sounded like Darth Vader. That explains why he’s so chill.

• The relentless work of being sick — ‌"The engine of capitalism is fatigue: the depletion of bodily capacity to its absolute limit. If all of that is depleted in simply trying to be okay, then you’re already rendered outside the fold of who we think of as a productive worker."
• Interview with Justin Broadrick on retiring Godflesh
• Edith Pritchett’s Bayeux tapestry for the modern age

One of those damn squirrels just went through the garden and Wally is not happy about this incursion.

Had my 6-weekly occupational therapy session for my chronic fatigue today which went well and was pretty useful. But otherwise quite tired after yesterday. No proper crash though, which is very pleasing. Might have paced it right. Will see.

Was going to write more but spent hours trying to find a very specific photo of my mum in 1980 to accompany the below. I’m sure it’ll turn up soon after I publish.

Gloria Steinem helped transform the world for everyone — Rebecca Solnit looks back on what Steinem and the other 70s feminists achieved, and what that legacy means to us today.

Talk of Ms Magazine has revived one of the vivid memories I have of my mother from around 1980. Freshly divorced, albeit embarking upon a long drawn out custody battle with my now Texas-based father, we have moved near Bristol and she took us to register at the big central library. Back then you were issued with a number of little cardboard envelopes into which the librarian would place a card from the book you were taking out and file it away until you returned it, then they’d give you your envelope back and put the card back in the book.

(Sidebar: describing how things worked before computers is bonkers.)

Each envelope had the name and address of the borrower written on it in pen, and because my sister and I were 5 and 8 ours were her name. I think we were able to borrow six books each, so let’s say she was issued with a stack of 18 envelopes.

The envelopes started with a Mr / Miss / Mrs choice. As I said, she was freshly divorced and did not see herself as a Miss or a Mrs. She was a Ms. So she sat there and furiously crossed out all three options and wrote Ms on every card.

I think I remember this so vividly because of how angry she was, which probably means she got into it with the librarian who was presumably not willing to make the alteration. This really mattered to her on an existential level. She was neither unmarried or married. Marriage did not define her. She was just a woman.

I think this was when I became a feminist.

• George Lucas unveils new LA Museum of Narrative Art — This whole thing is fascinating. The notion of a museum on this scale devoted to narrative art, that puts ‘low’ art-forms like comics on the same pedestal as the Sistine Chapel would have been unthinkable to me back in the day. Lucas has his problems, and doubtless there will be issues with the curation, but this looks like an astonishing achievement and a worthy legacy.
• Primitive Technology: Iron prill welding experiment — Always fascinated by his extracting iron ore from bacteria.
• 🎶🫠 Weezer’s Buddy Holly but pronouns speed it up & hoo hoo pitches it down & The Lick uhhh…

Grass is back on the menu, baby!

Another long night-and-morning’s sleep with no weird stress dreams, so that’s nice. I might have some tomorrow though as I fear I might have overdone it this afternoon.

My sister and bro-in-law were available to help sort out the roof of the rabbit run, something I’ve been slowly working on for a couple of weeks, and came over at 3pm to help lift my construction up. Of course once it was up it didn’t quite work as I’d planned.

The rabbit run is a structure which has been iterated upon many times over the last decade and really needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but who has the capacity for that? Not me, and definitely not before the autumn rains. So we’re back to try-it-and-see experimental architecture and bodges.

Fi was around to help me pace and I did take lots of breaks, but the combination of physical and mental activity has left me a bit dazed with some tinnitus. And of course I now have a desperate urge to get out there and fix it, which is the last thing I should do. A tired mind is awful at chasing the right thing to do.

Today’s links

• The astonishing hidden life of Mr T — Another great Simon Hattenstone interview. He’s on a roll right now, though it helps when you have good subjects who are not interested in toeing the company line. Netflix told me how much Mr T loved the documentary and how keen he was to promote it is followed by “The documentary pissed me off, because they didn’t cover a lot of stuff. When I saw it I was like: ‘What the heck?’ It’s garbage. You build me up, then you try to punk me out. I said: ‘Wow man, I’m more than that.’" And he is way more than that. What a man.
• We need to fix how Birmingham’s cycle routes are mapped and signed — Notable for the hilarious way Google Maps are deciding what is and isn’t a cycle route, presumably with some computer vision bollocks (sorry, ‘AI’) rather than depending on people who know how to map stuff. Also has some interesting suggestions and ideas for how this information could be sourced and organised on a local level.
• RIP Gloria Steinem - She helped our parents get woke.
  • Steinem writing about Dolly Parton in a 1987 Ms Magazine profile

Definitely a rest day. Slept right through to 1pm with very little mental disturbance, then Fi came home with great-neph M for an hour before taking him home after which I went back to sleep for a couple more hours. Feeling OK for it though. Sometimes excess sleep can be a problem but not today.

It’s properly damp outside now. The excess dryness of the drought has gone from our garden and everything has that autumnal vibe. It’s quite remarkable how quickly everything changes — the grass is pretty much a vibrant green already. It’s still warm though, which is pleasant.

See you outside?

Another for the “trying to digital detox” pile but noteworthy for relaying an observation by Jenny Odell: “She describes digital habits as grooves formed geologically over time, which is why cold-turkey attempts fail. Social pressure and muscle memory pull us back."

This rings true, and also works both ways. I’ve been off the Instagram app long enough now that I find it instantly repelling to the very core of my soul. I cannot conceive of how my friends, who are decent and intelligent people, can stand to be on it. I haven’t formed those grooves and so it slides right off me.

There are other things that I slot right into, to the point where I probably don’t notice if they’re good or bad for me. Certain YouTube channels might be a candidate here.

I guess the test is whether you find a commercial environment that is designed to extract value from you, be it an app, a shopping mall or a television format, comforting and safe. If so you need to fix that. Be smooth.

If Books Could Kill: Surrounded By Idiots

It’s probably unfair to expect a podcast about one thing to go off on a complete tangent to another thing, but I was a little disappointed that the Peter and Michael didn’t dig deeper into William Moulton Marston when they name checked him as the originator of the DISC assessment, a debunked pseudo-scientific personalty test still beloved by corporate managers looking to excuse their incompetence.

They mentioned that he created Wonder Woman but I wish they’d gone further as he was a fascinating character. Wonder Woman was based on William’s wife Elizabeth, their lover Olive and their lover Marjorie. Along with the polyamory they were very much into BDSM which also informed the Wonder Woman mythos with early issues explicitly promoting the spiritual and social benefits of domination.

That this was happening in the 1940s makes for a fascinating story about underground queer and bondage communities, emergent psychology and social liberation, before the moral majority crushed all dissent in the reactionary 50s. (Oh look, it’s Roy Cohn again.) There’s a biopic, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which while not perfect I can definitely recommend.

Oh, and DISC stands for dominance, inducement, submission and compliance, in case anyone was unsure where Marston was coming from. Kinda weird that it’s embraced across the business world.

Linky links

• 🎶 Shed your Skin by Unfuture — Always a bit trepidatious when a friend who is not a friend for any musical reasons announces they’ve recorded an album of music in their garden shed and you listen to it hoping against hope that it’s not cringe. Happy to say Matt’s album is pretty good! Phew!
• Why copyright doesn’t do shit for real-life artists who aren’t already fucking rich — Copyright law is not your friend, has never been your friend and will not save you. (Unless you have an army of expensive lawyers.)

Psychotherapy day today. For the last couple of weeks we’ve actually been talking about this blog. Despite it being a big part of my life for 26 years I still sort of think of my online emissions as being somehow not-real, or at least a sideline to my actual existence. Which is pretty fucked up given how much they’ve informed my life. Maybe that lessened when it was validated by people paying me money, but that didn’t last for long. Internalised blog-phobia is real, my friends!

It started when I sent my therapist a link to something I’d written, thinking it might be a good subject to talk about, but she was more interested in the fact that I’d published it on a public website and I found myself wanting to talk about that. Afterwards I felt I’d been too positive and maybe a little defensive, so this week I wanted to dig into some of the more conflicted feelings I have about my public writing and try to talk about them honestly for maybe the first time.

There’s the really simple stuff, like how I can edit my presentation to the world in a way that’s not possible in the street or pub. And then there’s getting into the theory weeds about living through media and what that can mean. I keep coming back to this utterly unsubstantiated theory I have that online communication tools were designed by lonely nerds to reach each other across time and space so someone in Slough could talk Star Trek with someone in Idaho. This needed tools that were laser focussed, eliminating all nuance and context for the strongest signal. And now those tools are being used by everyone regardless of their situation, which cannot be a good thing.

I introduced her to the concept of the map is not the territory, which I have a sense could have applications to therapy. Something about how the world we construct is not the world we live in, and that can fuck us up. It sure feels like that to me sometimes.

Anyway, it was good to actually talk about stuff rather than just triage a week of chronic fatigue. I feel like I understand what I’m doing a little bit more, so I guess we’re making progress.

This ‘digital camouflage’ shirt confuses AI-powered surveillance cameras

Digital camouflage seems to be the gift to artists that keeps giving. Variations of this crop up every year or so with Adam Harvey possibly being the first? Or at least the first I noticed.

The thing with this stuff is it doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t work in a consistent way as to make any difference. You are unlikely to be ‘protected’ by wearing this shirt because it’s unlikely that the systems recording you are running the same algorithm it was designed for. I played around with YOLO back in the day. While I’m sure it’s been improved it was never cutting edge. It decided one of my rabbits was a cow.

That’s not to say these artworks aren’t interesting and occasionally important. If they start a conversation about surveillance and data capture in the public domain then that’s a good thing and way more than the general media are doing. But they are not producing a practical solution (because they’re artworks, and art should never be a practical solution).

American Scoundrel book sheds fresh light on ruthless Roy Cohn

It’s very dangerous to place individuals at the centre of history but there are figures who, regardless of their actual influence, make very good focal points for understanding the threads that got us where we are today. Roy Cohn is definitely one of those people.

I first came across him when he was played by Al Pacino in the HBO adaptation of Angels in America, dying of AIDS in the 80s and haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. This portrayal stuck with me and I’ve been mildly fascinated by him ever since.

You can read more at the link (and that book does look very good) but in essence he’s the thread from the McCarthy witch hunts in the 1950s, through the mob, to shaping the mind of Donald Trump who he mentored as a young man. There’s been a handful books and documentaries about him but I think the best summary of his ideology was in the Trump biopic The Apprentice where, played by Jeremy Strong, he outlines how to win.

1. Attack attack attack.
2. Admit nothing, deny everything.
3. Always claim victory and never admit defeat.

If Epstein is a symptom, Cohn is patient zero. A nasty man who, at least in part, drafted the blueprints for the American 21st century.

• What happened to Antonio? — My good friend and erstwhile artistic colleague Antonio Roberts has also had a tough last few years, but much worse that I’d realised even though we met up recently. One of the bastard things about having a chronic condition, the worst thing probably, is you lose the capacity to be fully aware of how everyone else is. Anyway, I’m glad he’s doing better and is back on the art wagon.
• The teen listening to all 400 of Merzbow’s albums — The original headline for this was so judgemental I had to rewrite. It’s not an endurance exercise. Some people do get real pleasure from listening to extreme music. Anyway, this is a cool project that it’s great to see a young-un undertaking. I wish him well.
  • See also, Alexis Petridis listens to Throbbing Gristle for 24 hours — “It’s difficult to know exactly what would be the ideal activity to engage in while Throbbing Gristle provide the soundtrack. But I can reveal that shopping in central London is not among them."
• A lovely interview with Mary Austin, best friend of Freddie Mercury — For a book launch interview about a celebrity this was a surprisingly endearing and emotional read. As joint heir to his estate she locked all Mercury’s stuff away for decades after his death as it was too painful to deal with, only opening the boxes recently with her sons. The juxtaposition of her quiet life and the cultural enormity she was charged with protecting, and is now finally able to share, is quite a lot. (And the bit with her son at the end is… wow.)
• Adam Greenfield has a new website — It’s nice to see people putting a bit of care into their homepages when the trend seems to be abandoning them in favour of corporate socials.
  • A review of Lifehouse
• Know your branches of philosophy — A very simple guide.

A bit of a rest day after the weekend’s exertions. I feared a bit of a crash when I woke early in the morning to a rapid-fire slideshow of random imagery behind my eyelids, the sort of thing I would have enjoyed in an art context (and have inflicted on an audience in the past — see the second video for this project) but now recognise as a symptom of an exhausted mind. But it turned out that I just needed a few more hours sleep and was fairly fine by the afternoon.

We made a trip to the allotment to deposit the food waste and poopy rabbit hay into the compost hexagon which is now full to the brim. I expect this damper weather will speed it up after leaving it mostly dry over the summer and then it can be turned into the maturing cube.

I accidentally went mildly fedi-viral (like normal viral except on Mastodon so less traumatic) last night by sharing a life changing browser shortcut that it turns out few people know about.

In Firefox (and maybe elsewhere, I haven’t done a full survey) if you want to select the text of a link you can hold down Option ⌥ (on a Mac) and it will not activate the link.

The response to this was particularly satisfying because when I discovered it I was at work surrounded by bakers and cooks who were incapable of sharing my ecstatic delight. People who use Mastodon by comparison…

Was Pluto’s 2006 demotion a big mistake?

A fascinating look at the decision 20 years ago to demote Pluto and what the arguments are for bringing it back into the planetary fold.

Pluto’s demotion created two opposing scientific teams: the so-called geophysical camp, which believes the physical properties of a celestial body should count toward its planethood; and the dynamicists, who are more concerned with the position a body occupies, its surroundings and its direction of travel. You could characterise the split as planetary scientists v astronomers.

I’ve never been particularly partisan on this — the arguments seemed to be based on emotion rather than science — but reading the geophysical arguments I think I’m on team planet, even if that does mean Earth’s Moon is a both a planet and a moon.

For Metzger, the planetary definition excluding Pluto is based on an outmoded notion of the solar system. “They were creating a reactionary view towards an orderly cosmos, rather than the more modern scientific view where it’s chaotic,” he says. “The second problem was that I think they misread the room. The public of today is not the public of the 1800s. They’re perfectly happy understanding a dynamic, chaotic cosmos, and we missed the opportunity to teach that.”

A reactionary view of order butting up against the chaos of reality? Why does that sound familar.

Linky links:

• “I just chose words carefully.” — Marcin has a look at typesetting with monospaced fonts concluding with rs1n’s 17,000 word guide to Super Metroid where they copy-edited each line until it was fully justified without any extra spacing.
  • I was delighted, though not at all surprised, to discover our local hero Dracos does this sort of thing as a hobby.
• How record players work — Being old I knew most of this except the stereo bit and the RIAA curve which were pretty fascinating.
• Cooking with Pete: Courgette Fatteh — Way back in 2003 my friend Jez noticed that I had no idea how to cook a meal and so started posting recipes to his blog. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never managed to make one of them. But he keeps posting, because what is male friendship if not a commitment to the bit.
• The case of Aristotle and women’s teeth
• Tiny Awards voting is open
• 🎶 Fantastic Plastic Machine: Bon Voyage (escape mix feat. Yukari Fresh)

Another doing-things-away-from-the-computer day in which I might have overdone it but I tried to be careful about pacing so we will see. Fingers crossed for no big crash tomorrow.

Things involved getting the third water butt connected to my array at the right level so none of them overflow (or at least they all overflow at the same time) and then testing the connections. The connections leak but I had a feeling they would because they only have washers on one side and the butts are slightly curved so no matter how tightly I screwed them in there’s likely still a gap.

Yes I did text Fiona asking for help with a tight screw in the butt. It’s not easy to do a full reach around in those things.

Sorry. Not sorry.

The other thing was helping Fi put up some shelves in her office. She could do most of it but isn’t too confident about drilling into the bricks and since this is something I only recently figured out how to do without totally fucking it up I offered to expend some exertion points. The trick, as with most power tools, is to let the drill do the work. You have to apply a bit of pressure to make sure it stays in place, but as long as dust is coming out of the hole you know it’s steadily doing its job. No need to push hard.

We also remembered to put something down to catch the dust, something I usually don’t think to do, and it made for a delightful image (see above). If I was still into transmedial nonsense I’d have fed the image into a spectrograph to see what it sounded like.

[10 minutes later]

OK, I fed it through an image-to-sound converter and this is what it sounds like.

Stewart Lee on divorce, his adoption and the twisted children’s poem that explains his life

I thoroughly enjoyed this interview with Zoe Williams this morning. It’s a bit of a cliche that beardy middle aged blokes like me like Stewart Lee but I’m happy to lean into that. I didn’t fully realise how much he influenced how I wrote until I read one of his script books and saw the rhythm of my own work. Since then I’ve accepted him as my god.

• Williams also interviewed Bridget Christie last year. Collect the set.

A trove of clip art from the 90s, with multiple images of cows and chickens

A new-to-me blog which doesn’t seem to be updated that often which is a shame as I really liked this post about the time when CDs of clip art were big business, or at least a business.

What’s fascinating about this collection is how vintage so much of it is, clearly scanned from books of public domain images that themselves used to be a business before desktop publishing. I remember Dover Books were a major supplier of such things. And of course 90s zine-heads will be familar with Sean Tejaratchi who would raid these catalogues and other archives for gems for his publication Crap Hound.

I’d planned for today to be a computer-based writing day, given the rain forecast, but when I sat down to do some computer-based writing nothing was happening. Wrote a couple of sentences, deleted them, and figured a break outside might help. And then I spent the whole day in the garden, in the rain, doing garden stuff.

Turns out doing the prep work yesterday meant actually installing the water butts was a really simple job. I’m quite liking this new system of taking so much time over tasks (in order to avoid triggering a fatigue crash) that I think them through to a degree I’ve never been able to before. Sure, in the past I could have done the whole thing in a couple of hours but I would have fucked something up.

So we now have two water butts hidden between the rabbit run and the fence, ready to receive rainwater once we sort the roof out, and tomorrow, if I’m up to it, I can install the third, connect them all up and start filling them with the buckets of water I’ve been harvesting from the dome.

It’s all been splendidly satisfying without much, if any, exertion.

No links today. I read some bits during my breaks but nothing of note.

This is being stored here before installing and I thought it looked aesthetically pleasing.

Spent a reasonable amount of time pottering around in the garden today, along with a trip out to the local building supplies barns. While the dome water collection scheme is clearly a dumb thing to keep my brain active, we do have a more serious plan to capture rainwater from the rabbit run and today Fi drove us to Selco and Wickes to get stuff. Specifically two 210 litre butts, some guttering and a bunch of plastic bits and bobs.

The rabbit run is a classic piece of Pete iteration. It started off as a basic aviary made up of 3x6ft panels bolted to the shed, which I then put a sloping roof on so we didn’t bang our heads, and then put corrugated roofing panels on to keep the rain off. Because none of this was planned properly, and because it doesn’t really matter (the rabbits have full access to the shed for real shelter) the drainage is a bit haphazard. I plan to fix that with the structure pictured above which will help direct the water into one place.

As with most of the things I do now I have chronic fatigue, most of my time is spent slowly figuring out what needs to be done and making plans before getting some help to do the actual work. I reckon in a week or two, once the storms have hopefully passed, we should be ready to put it all together. Today, though, involved understanding the design decisions the makers of these water butts made and figuring out how I can work with them in the tight space I’ve got next to the run. It should be fine.

Linky links

• The small print left out of the plug-in solar announcement
• 2,000 pairs of cotton underwear were buried in Switzerland to test soil health
• Get Back to your tenements! The modern relevance of Nuts In May
• A relaxing buggy stroll through the streets of Harringay
• Mug-wump Specific cure and preventative for all venereal diseases

Wally and Lav, impatient for the grass to go green again now it’s rained.

There was a thing a few years ago, back when wildfires were rare and noteworthy, where people were noticing that their cameras weren’t taking accurate photos of the red skies, shifting the white balance so it looked a bit more “normal”.

I’ve been noticing it on a more mundane scale when photographing the rabbits on our lawn. The camera is fine when the grass is green but the deep orange of the parched turf makes it want to shift everything towards a colder blue. I’m quite used to this in urban and artificial environments — a blue or orange wall is always going to need some manual tweaking — but you can generally assume that a balanced composition of nature is going to automatically calibrate correctly.

I guess that’s a new marker of the climate catastrophe reaching you: when your camera can no longer approximate an accurate reproduction of how the world looks to you.

Happy plug-in solar day in the UK!

Of course after months of continuous sunshine the weather in Birmingham has been thunderstorms and steady rain throughout the day. You couldn’t make this shit up.

This looks to be the standard piece of kit, an 800w Solar Microinverter with cables for £129. (There are cheaper ones on the various websites but they’re not necessarily compatible with the UK.) In my head I was expecting to have to buy the panels with the inverter but it just occurred to me that any panels will probably do. There’s a healthy second hand market which might be worth exploring over the winter months, potentially making this even more affordable for next summer.

In the meanwhile it might be worth plugging some hydro generators in the drains…

How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’

Zoe Williams breaks down recent research in high functioning psychopaths, the sort you find in management and politics. I’ve often thought that the reason there’s such a prevalence of neurodivergent traits becoming a disabling problem is not that autism etc is growing but that the world has become harder for people who have those traits to function in. It’s not so much that the past was better — it most definitely wasn’t — but something about the end of the 20th century (let’s say the neoliberal era) turned the screws on the weirdos a bit more than usual.

The problem is that this world was constructed to suit a certain type of personality and that those types will tend to rise to the top, meaning they have no impetus to change it. It’s a bit like how voting reform is hard because the people who benefit from the current system are those with the power to change it, and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

That would bad enough, but when a those at the top are also psychopaths then things get a bit messy, because psychopathic traits don’t allow for stuff like empathy. Look at how the billionaire class are shitting on it as a concept. You’re not going to do the ‘right thing’ and give away your power because your brain is wired to see nothing wrong with the current situation.

I guess this is how revolutions start.

Woke what? Let’s be fucking serious

A response to the “Woke 1.0 was a bit much” discourse that seems to be particularly prevalent in the New York Times, pointing out that while yes, some leftist voices were very annoying in 2020 they weren’t actually in a position to make any real changes.

The key bit for me is this perception that the “crazy” online stuff, as amplified by the algorithms, has become the received history of what was actually going on on the ground, and anyone who’s been even slightly involved in community organising knows there’s a huge gulf between the two. It’s why online commentators were so surprised when last year’s anti-ICE protests seemed to come from nowhere. Because they weren’t organised online — they were the result of years of seemingly boring (but ultimately rewarding) drudge work in neighbourhoods.

Leftists and progressives can be infuriating, especially when they get a sense that they might be able to make their strongly held utopian ideas come true. But they soon get over it. I know I did.

Fish Tales

There’s only one way to get me to read about the Nolan’s Odyssey this summer and that’s to have the redoubtable Erik Davis let the tendrils of his weird brain spread over it. Naturally he brings in Moby Dick and the Leviathan but also spins off into other movies and books, which I appreciated. (The Love That Remains is already on my watchlist.)

And of course while he’s much more generous that I would be there’s a few digs at Nolan’s sexless, anthropocentric normie style.

And while much has been made of the open-ocean shooting conditions behind the storm sequence, with actors puking as they got soaked with actual spay, I found the scene lackluster, and for one specific technical reason. Nolan anchored the cameras to the longboat, which means the film’s POV unwaveringly retains the level stability of the boat vis-à-vis the roiling rollercoaster disorientation of the sea. Besides diminishing our own participation in the wooze, this decision retains agency with the humans rather than giving it over to the ocean.

I might have to actually hate-watch the bloody film now.

Linky links

• Birmingham seeks injunction to stop anti-migrant group erecting flags on infrastructure — Finally! Kinda tragic that it took Labour losing control of the council to make this happen.
• Small talk is TCP handshaking for humans — Funny if you know what TCP handshaking is. If you don’t know what TCP handshaking is Wikipedia got ya.
• Europe’s wildfires have raised the danger posed by unexploded bombs — “Europe is contaminated with explosive remnants of two world wars and roughly four decades of cold war military activity." Also there’s an “annual ‘iron harvest’ of first world war shells turned up by farmers every spring” in northern France and Belgium.
• 226 photographs by Ansel Adams free to download — Adams' photography remains astonishing and I will definitely be working my way through this list, albeit with the knowledge that he was a printmaker as much as a photographer — he considered the taking of the photograph the easy bit, even when it involved walking up a mountain — so these scans will not do them justice.
• A lovely letter sent to Molly Crabapple about her book about the Jewish Bund — This bit I liked a lot: “Ask any cheder kid why the Temple was destroyed and he will answer two words: sin’as hinam, baseless hatred. And what will rebuild it? Ahavas ahim, fraternal love. This is the meaning of the exile. The only path for survival is through creating the conditions for fraternal love."
• RIP Yayoi Kusama — And that’s number three. Sheesh.

A geodesic dome water reclamation experiment

A few days ago I was mulling over using our garden geodesic dome as a rainwater collection conduit. Not because it’s a particularly practical idea (the house roof is just over there and has guttering already installed) but as a dumb fun exercise. Soon after, Fi was continuing her slow emptying of junk in the attic and came down with a gazebo tent, albeit with no poles, which has been used to protect the camera obscura when it rained and was now without purpose.

On a whim I laid it out and measured it and the distance between the guy-rope hoops turned out to be exactly the same as the distance between three dome joints. Given a square was never going to perfectly match the corners of a decagon this was as good as it was going to get.

Thunder storms have been forecast this week and today was the prelude. I hung the tent in the dome, cut a hole in the middle, weighed it down with a couple of crowbars and stuck a container underneath.

And it worked! An hour of rain half-filled a 45 litre Samla box!

Now, the trick is to automatically feed it from that relatively low position into a large storage butt, lest we be swapping out buckets during the next storm, but that’s for another day.

Admin

I spent a bit of time this morning fiddling with the layout of this blog, most obviously putting link emojis in front of each link in the link lists and making the section dividers within the post a little more obvious. It was pleasing. I like iterative design.

Today’s links

• Nick Abadzis and Angela Watson discuss us, them and their joint memoir — Lovely interview conducted by my old chum Mardou. Really looking forward to reading their new book My Beloved Other.
• Yes, Dolly was actually that great — Turns out Lindsay Ellis just finished a two-part video essay on Dolly Parton and is putting it on YouTube as a fundraiser.
• How the Internet Archive scans books non-destructively — This is the machine I was alluding to the other day and which I saw demonstrated way back in 2013. But yeah, destroying the books is cheaper and faster.
• Bonnie “Prince” Billy live at Supersonic Festival 2024 — The full hour set. I’ve had this on in the background today and it’s delightful.
• RIP Tim Curry — Hope he’s now in the one place that isn’t corrupted by capitalism.

While this post is mostly about Lav she wasn’t very camera friendly today, while Wally-the-tart went and did this. So here’s Wally.

Lavander is much better.

She recovered about 10pm last night, taking some pellets and running around after treats. Her “down time” was a bit longer than we’re used to for a problem we can treat without the vet and I was sure we’d be on the phone first thing, but no, she’s fine.

This happens to one of the rabbits every few months and we’ve very good at spotting it. We tend not to panic and call the vet but monitor the bun and treat as needed. Most of the time they get better and we save on vet bills, but because we’re quick off the mark we never know if the rabbit would have recovered fine on their own.

Wally went a bit off last week. He suddenly changed his behaviour and didn’t want any treats, so we initiated the usual plan of giving him a tummy massage and then watching. Within an hour he was fine. Would Lav have been fine had we not been around yesterday? Did she need the emergency feed and motility medicine? Impossible to say.

It’s getting close to six years since we got these two rabbits. Wally was 1 and Lav 6 months, so given the 10-12 year life expectancy they’re over half-way. Once they die we’ll probably take a break from the bun life, as radical as that might seem. They give us a lot, but they’ve also taken a lot these last 14 years.

Telly thoughts

We’ve been enjoying the second season of Ludwig. I’ve particularly enjoyed how David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin play a relationship dynamic that formed when they were eight years old and which they’ve clearly snapped back to now they’ve been thrust back together by the plot. It’s the sort of thing that could fall into parody but Maxwell Martin nails it as a woman who never had the little miss bossy-pants fully crushed out of her by the patriarchy.

I was thinking I’d love to see a prequel set in the 1980s when they were kids and then it occurred to me they could do that with this cast just acting as children. I mean, they’re halfway there already. Which then took me down a clickhole of Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills which looks much odder than I remember it.

• Helen Mirren Remembers… Blue Remembered Hills

Ours is the tragedy of the silent stars

PGR sees himself in the silent movie actors left behind by the march of technology when he entertains “the thought of mugging into a phone camera and a ring-lamp." Much nodding from me but he takes it in directions I need to spend more time with.

Our attention, our very sanity, is the last fungible resource remaining to us, and we’re burning through it in a way that makes our dalliance with hydrocarbons look like a practice run. You can slow down, perhaps, but you can never stop running—because even if you’re not trampled, you’ll be left in the dust which is the true final product of economic efficiency.

I liked this in the conclusion:

Readers of my own generation may recall a line from a movie, which—rather ironically, particularly in hindsight—is given to an artificial intelligence: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Not playing is something I often realise I should be doing.

Climate-saving wonder – or €240m vanity bauble that ages like milk? The rocks set to hit Rotterdam docks

From MVRDV, the same irredeemable tossers who did that idiotic Marble Arch Mound in London. This is the sort of crap I feel is better to ignore that to give the oxygen of outrage, but I suspect these charlatans are going to continue to launder public money with their techno-solutionist garbage spectacles unless we sneer hard and laugh at them. Nice to see this piece is taking the cynical approach. They deserve nothing less. Sorry for your loss Rotterdam.

Today’s links

• Australia turned the duck curve into a platypus — The duck curve is the variable cost of electricity during the day when you have a mix of variable renewables and gas. This is a nice short video explaining how batteries have solved the variable bit. (Speaking of, I’ve been thinking we should lobby for data centres to be scrapped in favour of battery parks. Same local job outcomes with fewer shite effects.)
• Feminism for a World on Fire by Natasha Walter review – hope amid the hopelessness — This looks really interesting, a companion to Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End maybe?
• Misogynistic views are biggest red flag for violent extremism, report finds — I’m not sure why this is being described as an “extraordinary” link. Misogyny is a pretty extremist position in itself.
• TIL Fibonacci numbers can convert miles to kilometres
• Salt In The Blood — Danny’s back? Or at least not writing behind a Substack gate.
• RIP Dolly P — The very best of what America can be.