Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

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Status:

So the far-right came back to Stirchley yesterday to put up their flags and when they departed a local man was in hospital. Things have clearly escalated.

I’ve been stewing on this all day, which is not healthy as it’s incredibly draining, but my brain is going do its thing so I’m taking care and riding it out. One of the things I keep coming back to is their indignity at being stopped. It seems the original plan was to put flags on lampposts all down the Pershore Road into the city centre. This takes them through traditionally white working class areas, many of which went to Reform last week. And then they came to Stirchley.

In the 70s and 80s Stirchley was a far-right hotspot. The British Oak was well known as a National Front pub and Fiona, who grew up here, remembers the Stirchley Skins gang making the parks no-go areas. But it isn’t anymore. A few decades of economic depression left it run-down, unfashionable and, crucially, cheap. Priced out of places like Moseley and Kings Heath the artists and the queers and the weirdos started to move in, and then the type of middle class liberal people who like living around artists and queers and weirdos followed with their money, and now here we are. You can debate as to whether it’s better or worse, or if it even matters, but the fact is the area has changed in some quite fundamental ways.

And so when the fascists came to put up their flags they weren’t expecting any resistance. For all its diversity Stirchley is still pretty fucking white and looks like any number of Birmingham suburbs. But we took their flags down. So they put them up again. So we took them down. And thus Stirchley became a front line in whatever the fuck this is supposed to be.

I’d hasten to say this is totally unwanted. We don’t like being on the front line and wish these arseholes would leave us alone. But for whatever reason they keep coming back.

I would be a fool to say I know the mind of a fascist but I can speculate. I don’t think like being told “no”. These men were going ahead with their dumb plan to cover the city in flags with no serious pushback, because the authorities know better than to poke the bear if they can help it. Then they reached our little community and we say no, we know what you’re doing and we won’t let you do this. We want you to stop. And they lost their fucking minds.

It’s the same mindset that blames Ukraine for the Russian invasion. Or a woman for being assaulted by her partner. If you hadn’t upset him he wouldn’t have hit you.

I could write more, and maybe I will. When you’ve lived somewhere for a while you kinda take it for granted and don’t notice the valuable stuff, until some thugs threaten to smash it up. I’d like to dig into what’s special about my neighbourhood and how it’s functioned as a sanctuary for those who don’t fit in elsewhere. It’s not perfect, of course, but I’ve moved around a lot in my life and it’s the first place where I’ve felt comfortable and safe, and that’s worth documenting. And defending.

Reading:

• There is a light that never goes out — Ian Dunt on the prospect of Prime Minister Andy Burnham. One should not pins any hopes on one person, nor expect them to live up to your filtered idea of them, but it is reassuring that Burnham is a supporter of electoral reform and has advocated working across party barriers. Having someone like that lead the Labour Party rather than the usual tribal twonks would be promising start.
• From men on dog leads to public breast-fondling, Valie Export’s art demanded a total feminist revolution — One of those artists I’m only discovering after they die. Her manifesto was published in 1972 so I can add that to my long list of “interesting things that happened when I was born.”
• Rich Guy Quote Journalism — “There’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as ‘rich guy has an opinion.’ It’s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you’ll see it everywhere: entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage."

Watching:

• BFI Archive: collecting online moving image ‌(10:56) — The headline is Badgers Badgers Badgers has been preserved for the nation, along with the Spongemonkeys. The methodology of deciding what to preserve, and how to do it while respecting the original authors, is fascinating.

Listening:

• In Our Time: Joseph Roth — Like most histories of Jewish intellectuals in the early 20th century it doesn’t end well but at least he drunk himself to death rather than being murdered by Nazis. I wasn’t familiar with his work which deals with a “new nationalism” which he saw sweeping post-imperial Europe much to his horror. That sounds pretty timely.

Printing:

• Zines for allotmenteers — Three cute little four-pagers which I’m going to run off to leave at our allotment.

Status:

Rest day after two sequential days of therapy sessions. Mostly pottering around the house, half-cleaning and sort-of tidying things.

Reading:

• The Inventory of Loss - What chronic illness takes that no one warns you about — I could quote so much of this with the comment “this is how it is for me” that I’d just be reposting the whole article. Just read it.
• ‘Oh my God, did my dad and I fight’: Olivia Colman on triggers, trans rights and sexual regret — Intervewing her and other cast and crew for the new film Jimpa, which looks really good.
• The present crisis: A conversation on attacks and repression in London. — I’m trying to read more Jewish voices on anti-semitism in the UK. This discussion after the Golders Green stabbings was very illuminating.
• Make your own micro forest — A really nice introduction to the Miyawaki method of reforestation which involves densely planting a variety of native trees in a small place and letting them compete for resources. Someone has done this on our allotment and I wasn’t sure what it meant until now. Looks really promising and, most importantly, achievable on a community scale.

Watching:

• Luxury pencil sharpener restoration ‌(16:28) — There a fine line, I find, between restoring and cleaning and this video is mostly cleaning, though that’s not a problem as I’d never really seen inside one of these before.

Music:

• Absens by MMMD — I described this to Fi as “Ottoman ambient drone” though that’s not remotely accurate and probably insulting. sounds great though.

Telly:

• Rooster

Status:

The big news today is hedgehog videos. The footage from Monday night was exciting but the footage from last night was astonishing! Our two hogs had a proper face-off at 4am with whole minutes of grunting, circling and head-tilting. All of which must mean something, though even my personal hedgehog expert (hi Roo) was at as loss as to exactly what.

Turn your volume up and watch the shit out of this.

In more personal news I had my monthly occupational therapy session and it was pretty positive. I went though how I’ve approached various challenges over the last few weeks and I’m generally doing things right, and when I’m not I’m interpreting my body and mind’s responses in a good way. Still very low down on the recovery ladder but making progress.

Reading:

• The Red Hand Files #364 — Reassuring to know Nick Cave listens to podcasts like I do. “This podcast generally amounts to one person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to another person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, about something I know absolutely nothing about, and this triumvirate of stupidity generally lulls me into some approximation of sleep."
• Save For Web claws — Being the shape your hand has to make in order to press all the keys needed to invoke this in Photoshop. My daily version of this is Paste & Match Style which requires the finger jujitsu of ⌥⇧⌘V but it’s worth it because who ever wants to not do that?
• Impatience: killer of governments — Was hoping for a “fear is the mind-killer” reference but will settle for a clear headed rant. Sidebar: has been rather disconcerting today to see references to “allies of Wes Streeting”, implying those people actually exist. Brrrr.
• Safe and cozy in your doomsday bunker — Garbage Day on the Bluesky Bubble. I have thoughts about this but no headspace for a full ramble tonight. In short, I think mainstream culture (which is what Xitter is, sadly) has always been broadly toxic in this way and any space you can carve out away from it should be celebrated, not fretted over for not winning some unwinnable war, because that’s where you can plan and build and survive. Good on BlueSky for being irrelevant. Keep it up.

Looking:

• Ryan McGinley’s photography — An astonishing body of work I’d not come across before. Reminds me in places of Nan Goldin. Cited in Marisol Mendez’s best photograph as “nudes … where the bodies didn’t feel sexual, it seemed so rebellious to me. Being naked is being oneself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual, or allude to desire. It can just be the comfort of being in your own skin." And nice to discover he did a Sigur Ross album cover that I’ve always liked.

Watching:

• Shell as ready-made globular aerophone ‌(1:08) — Oh Sam, never change.
• A Song for Eurotrash (1998) ‌(50:54) — What you have to remember when watching this is we were all very very drunk at the time.
• I took Not Just Bikes cycling in London ‌(41:05) — When I lived in central London circa 2001-3 I walked everywhere but even so it’s fascinating to see how the traffic has changed in 25 years.

Music:

• Far From Nowhere by Josienne Clarke

Telly:

• Rooster

Status:

We’d heard from neighbours that hedgehogs had been spotted so I put out the trailcam for the first time since the autumn and caught two of the little buggers! Loads of footage which I will edit into a video when I find the time but here’s a screenshot of them having a face-off at 3am.

So good to see them back in the garden. We had a lot of hog action but it suddenly stopped around this time last year so we were worried sometime had happened and we’d seen the last of them. Fingers crossed they hang around and we get some babies later.

Had my mental health therapy session today (as opposed to my CFS therapy, which is tomorrow) and it wasn’t too draining, though we’re still setting the groundwork so haven’t dug into anything just yet.

Have been feeling much brighter today, to the point where I need to be careful not to get too carried away. A few times I could feel a slight mania kicking in which feels good but is potentially very bad, so I have to stop and retreat and calm down.

Reading:

• Hip young gunslingers — The cartoonist John Allison answers my question about writing young characters while getting increasingly older yourself.
• Subvert.FM’s FAQ — Interesting looking attempt to do Bandcamp as a cooperative.

Watching:

• Blast cleaning my water well — New mildly eccentric long-form European rural YouTuber just dropped into my sphere. Mattias Bjoernstroem, “living in Northern Sweden close to the Arctic Circle”. During this video he drops a stick of dynamite into his well to clean the pipe.

Listening:

• Empire: Simón Bolívar - Liberator of Latin America pt 3: Descent Into Tyranny

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

Feeling a bit better today but still pretty low. I tried a couple of tricks to shake me out of it, which usually work when I’m just in a funk, but they didn’t do their magic this time so I reckon this is the fatigue. Which is good as the fatigue passes with rest. Eventually.

One of the tricks was to dive into a spreadsheet. I transcribed all the voting results from the Birmingham elections into a big sheet and had a look at what the overall voting share looked like. The popular vote, if you will.

The Greens, Reform and Labour all got near as damn it 20% of the vote. The Greens officially won but not by a significant margin.

I then figured out how this might look using a simple proportional representation system, dividing the 101 seats accordingly. This was surprisingly close to how FPTP played out, which was rather annoying as I don’t like FPTP. Of course people would vote differently under a different system so not much should be read into this.

Here’s the Google doc if you want to make a copy of it and have a play yourself. I’m pretty sure I copied the results accurately but caveat emptor, I do have CFS.

Reading:

• Closure of Radio 4 on Long Wave — Feels like one of those “end of the 20th century” moments.
• The Asteroid and the Meaning of Life
• I want to live like Costco people — One of the best side-things about working at Loaf was access to the Booker cash & carry card, even though Booker is owned by Tesco and isn’t that much cheaper than in the supermarket. There’s something about wholesale… See also Selco.
• ‘Everyone was in tears’: the tenants given eviction notices just before ban in England — Whenever you see some sob story about landlords and their great burden, remember shit like this. Fucking terrible way for a society to manage a vital need.
• Why I love Brighton - reason no. 45: New Age bullshit — My old Brummie chum Danny has been living in Brighton for a while now and clearly doesn’t feel like a local yet.
• People who don’t like people are making all of our decisions — “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated." Years and years ago, at the dawn of social media as a concept, I was consulting for Will Perrin at Talk About Local, a startup looking to get neighbourhoods sharing news online using blogs and stuff. After the meeting I said offhandedly how ironic me advising on social media was as I didn’t really like people that much and used the internet to route around them (undiagnosed neurodivergent that I was). He said most of the people he was talking to were like that. It didn’t seem like a problem at the time.

Watching:

• I spent 30 days restoring this top cabinet ‌(55:37)

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

Well, this is the first time in a while I’ve come to my text document at the end of the day to find it completely empty. It seems I read, listened and saw nothing I felt was worth noting today. And if you’ve been reading this for a while you’ll know that’s a very low bar.

To be honest today has been a bit shite. Low mood, head stress, feeling grumpy and useless and sad. It will pass (it’s starting to pass already) and it’ll be OK.

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

This quarter’s Rabbiting On from the RWAF arrived which is always a pleasure and I spent the afternoon flicking through it. As I’ve mentioned before it’s a mix of rabbit care advice and really gruesome veterinary photos, all wrapped in a graphic design that looks like a magazine for kids who are obsessed with cute fluffy bunnies. In many ways it perfectly reflects the rabbit community: deadly serious advocacy from the sort of people who enjoy talking in baby voices to silent prey animals. I love the magazine but even after all these years – and it’s been years – I remain fascinated by it.

Otherwise a rest & restore day after the yesterday’s excitements. Weather was surprisingly warm so we put the big sail shade over the dome, and I caught up with a neighbour who hadn’t been out in her garden for a while. She gave me a leftover tonne-sack. Nice.

Reading:

• Our cities are choked by cars – here’s how experts would fix them — Nothing particularly new here but always nice to have a plain-language list of the basics available to share.
• Why do Oregon farms plant red clover every spring? — Not specific to Oregon, clover is a great way to not only get nitrogen into the soil but also prevent erosion out of season by ensuring there are live roots holding the soil together.
• Litter in hedgehog nests — Plastic and other anthropogenic materials might not be a problem but more research is needed. Research which is being done by Katie Crawford who not the same person as AI researcher Kate Crawford.
• What is Birmingham’s political future? — Short answer, nobody knows, but this is a nicely concise explainer as to why nobody knows. (One correction though, not all of the independents are aligned with the Workers Party, so there’s potential wiggle room.)
• What happens when a ‘paper candidate’ actually wins — A good friend of ours does this for the LibDems in our ward. He stands no chance of winning but it allows the party to say they have candidates across the region. We were joking that given the splits and uncertainty this year he might accidentally win. He came fifth, much to his relief.

Listening:

• Empire: Liberator of Latin America pt 2: Napoleon & The Legions of Hell — One thing I’ve been surprised about when listening to history stuff is how wrong I am about when Napoleon was doing his thing. While I know that the French and American revolutions happened in the same generation and shared a few actors, I always think of Napoleon as being before all that, which is utterly nonsensical. Maybe it’s because he looks pre-modern with his horse and sword? Anyway, spoiler that the Legions of Hell are not controlled by Napoleon, they’re a different thing.

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

I’ll be honest, today was pretty much spent refreshing the Birmingham council election results and nattering about it on the local chats. I could come to like these daytime counts.

So we have a Green Party councillor. The results will hopefully be here once the Birmingham.gov.uk website recovers, and it was surprisingly close, which says a lot about the Labour incumbent who was one of those good ones who did a lot for this community. As an individual she’ll be missed. The party machinery she was chained to, not so much.

The Muesli Belt in Birmingham has pretty much gone Green, which wasn’t a big surprise, but so have a load of other places making them the 2nd biggest party. I was not expecting that. (Moseley, the origin of the Muesli Belt jibe, has stayed Lib, because of course it has.)

One thing I’m keen to do is have a proper look at the vote shares and margins. There’s some crazy ones out there where people were elected on a quarter or a fifth of the vote, and a lot of the gains are really tight.

If there’s a non-partisan campaign that needs to happen now it’s for voting reform before the next big election. First past the post is utterly unfit for purpose. Hopefully Labour will use their majority to push this through in the next year. It’s not like they have much to lose, which is usually the argument against reform.

As for Birmingham, it’s No Overall Control, as expected, with the added bonus of coalitions not adding up in any useful way. The closest I can see is Lib + Lab + Green + 6 lefty independents, which from where I’m sitting makes sense but I’m sure the tribal mindset is having conniptions. The good news is even if Reform and the Tories come together they won’t have enough seats to govern, so we’re saved that nightmare.

And that’s enough punditry for now. On days like this I can see how people get caught up in The Great Game of it all. Despite the stakes being high and the consequences dire, it’s a lot of fun! Until it’s not.

Reading:

• Unmasking Angine de Poitrine, the year’s buzziest, dottiest band — Nice interview by the mighty Laura Snapes. They seem like cool kids.
• Local elections 2026: Some disparate thoughts — Ian Dunt’s phrase “does not have the confidence to try and convince the public of an argument” rings pretty key to me. No politician seems willing to try and change minds, just follow the herd. And the herd is having its minds changed beyond recognition by the paid-for mass and social media. Maybe that old tyrant Plato was right about philosopher kings…

Watching:

• Primitive Technology: Mud mortar experiment and firing roof tiles ‌(24:28)

Listening:

• Origin Story: European Union pt 2

Telly:

• Wonder Man — Highly enjoyable and a lot of fun. Would recommend to all. Even if it does do that thing where we spend 7 episodes of preamble before the hero gets their costume and does a superhero thing for two scenes.

Status:

Did my voting duty. It’s been really weird living in a traditionally ultra-safe Labour ward and for the first time having a viable slate of candidates with no idea which will win. This must be what it’s like living in a swing seat. We’ve had so many leaflets. I’ve scanned them all and will be uploading to Election Leaflets for posterity. Traditionally I stay up all night for the results but since my sleep is pretty disrupted, and Birmingham isn’t scheduled to declare until Friday evening, I reckon I’ll just check in periodically when I inevitably wake up overnight.

Interesting times.

Bit of a nasty headache today for reasons I’m not sure of. Could be that I forgot to take my morning pills yesterday, but I’m not sure if I did or not. I don’t have a particularly bad memory. It’s more that I can’t be sure when the memory happened because the context clues are all the same. I get up, make a cup of tea, grab half a biscuit (I’ve never been able to swallow tablets without food) and take my pills. I have plenty of recent memories of that happening but can’t tell if it happened yesterday. So I’m back to writing MTWTFSS on the blister packs like I have dementia or something.

Current meds are Paroxetine to stave off the crushing despair of chronic fatigue and Tamsulosin for my enlarged prostate (ask your local friendly middle-aged man), plus Melatonin in the evening to remind my body to send sleepy signals to my brain. It’s not an overwhelming cocktail, to be fair, and not problematic if I miss a dose. Save for the headache.

Reading:

• White backlash politics and the reframing of narrative logic: Reconsidering Revenge of the Sith on its 20th anniversary — “In the mid-2000s, audiences did not readily accept George Lucas’s dominant encoding of a heroic protagonist embracing imperial power. Yet two decades later, the spectacle of a white man turning against his community to support authoritarian practices no longer reads as implausible but as a recognizable feature of the contemporary political landscape." This is more about how interpretations of media change over time than saying RotS is now a good movie (no matter what the 20-somethings who grew up with it might think). I would definitely agree that Anakin’s turn makes much more sense in the age of Trump.
• Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’ — George Monbiot on the crazy idea of listening to people and having conversations with them. He references Common Ground who look worth investigating, but this sort of thing can be done in a much more informal way by having community spaces where people can meet and talk and share their worries and ideas. See this piece on Paris where socially aware urban planning is detoxifying the discourse, as it were.

Admin:

• Have updated the About page, fixing some things and explaining that I am an unreliable narrator regarding my condition.

Telly:

• Wonder Man

Status:

Lavander^* needed a groom today, as you can see in the above photo. Rabbits tend to shed in phases up their bodies, starting at the tail and moving towards the neck, so we’re at tufty butt stage with Lav. I have a theory that in nature grooming gets dealt with by running through hedgerows and spiky undergrowth which are absent in our garden, so we have to do it manually. Otherwise she and Wally might ingest too much hair when grooming each other which can be dangerous (and makes their poops string together in a line like Christmas lights, but that’s beside the point.) Normally we do this together but Fi was otherwise engaged so I figured I’d do it myself. Lav was not happy and did her best to escape but I held on and didn’t get bitten. One rabbit successfully de-fluffed. Yay!

Lav is a bit of a nightmare, but that’s just her nature. When we adopted her and Wally from Fat Fluffs (and if you’re contemplating a rabbit then please adopt, don’t shop) we’d had Wally on hold while he recovered from his neutering op and knew he was a friendly snugglebun, but we needed a lady to bond with him. Lav was the runt of a litter born at the rescue and all her siblings had already been adopted. She was angry and aggressive, growling at anyone who came near, rabbit or human. We took pity on her and said “go on, throw her in”. Ever since Fi has taken her on as a project, slowly wearing her down with strokes and pats, and she’s much better than she was. That’s not saying much though and she still growls and cannot abide her whiskers being touched.

Our approach to rabbits is to let them be how they want to be. We invite them to hang with us and maybe bribe them a bit with small pieces of banana, but if they want to be alone then that’s fine. I personally don’t think they make good pets, though all rabbits are different and I know some can make good companion animals (particularly the giant breeds), but they’re also not wild animals and need human care. So we like to approach them in a husbandry way, giving them what they need, intervening where necessary and enjoying their presence and company when they choose to share it. Lav might not like physical contact but she often sits near us, just out of arm’s reach, and we’re delighted she wants to do that.

^* Correct spelling. Full name is Lavander Graph Generator. Wally’s name is Walter Bunjamin. Previous rabbits include Clementine Bundango and Bunminster Fuller. The vet nurses delight in calling them out.

Reading:

• “It’s Strange To Be Talking About the Flaming Lips In The Past Tense”: An Interview With Steven Drozd — I loooove the Flips but lately had them down as a heritage act building up the pension fund, which is fair enough, they had a very good run. The notion of new work by Drozd is very interesting though.
• The Boring Internet — Another for the “the internet you loved is still there” pile.
• As Labour heads for a wipeout, a lesson: never fall for the ‘adults in the room’ line again “When the people in charge can no longer make arguments for their positions, they shut down the argument entirely by pleading for “grownups”."

Watching:

• Take a tour of my garden with me ‌(10:08) — This is uncannily like visiting my grandpa in the 80s.
• Low-head water turbine build tutorial ‌(4:37) — I’m probably never going to build one of these but I’ve loved learning how they work. (This isn’t really a tutorial, more an illustration to go alongside one.)
• How TV made American homes feel fake ‌(13:08) — The bit about the Brady Bunch house being an open plan fortress against the outside world reminded me of visiting my dad in his suburban Houston, Texas home in the late 80s. It was exactly like this.

Listening:

• Empire: Liberator of Latin America: Simón Bolívar vs The Spanish Empire (Part 1) — My knowledge of how South America became post-imperial sucks, so hoping this’ll help.

Looking:

• Removing all IR and UV filters from an old Canon EOS 600D to do full spectrum, UV and IR photography — I have an old DSLR I’m not using. I wonder if there’s a guide to hacking it to do this…

Telly:

• Wonder Man — Halfway through and I’m thinking, is this an autism metaphor? Admittedly I think that about a lot of media, but in this case I’m not alone.

Status:

Had my first session with my new therapist from Meridian today. They’re a charity that offer means-tested discounted therapy with trainee therapists. It was a life-saver for me as I navigated the brain-melting confusion of chronic fatigue while on the waiting list for a specialist. I’m getting more structured support from the NHS now, so the mental burden isn’t quite so unbearable, but when my previous therapist finished her studies in January we decided it was worth continuing.

It was a getting-to-know-you session so nothing too heavy and it was good to vocalise everything that’s happened to me to a new person and get that overview perspective. I was slightly surprised to go back and see this has been going on for at least four years now. Four years used to be a really long time but it seems to have just flown by. But maybe that’s just aging.

Even though it wasn’t the most intense of sessions it was still an hour of talking and thinking so by the end I was pretty wiped out. I’m still not properly recovered from the weekend’s crash and likely won’t be for a few days.

Reading:

• Pop Will Eat Itself - Covers (EP) — From the “Every Number One in the NME Indie Charts” blog. Is it possible to like PWEI as a grown adult or are they best left to teenage memories? I identify with the author here as a youth and do occasionally revisit This Is This but I will concede Box Frenzy, no matter how much I enjoyed it at the time, is not going to get an anniversary post in the Quietus.
• The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto — via someone on my feed asking for a short explainer of why meritocracy is a bad idea. Gonna keep this to hand.

Watching:

• The visual comedy of Isle Of Dogs ‌(10:55)
• Glenn Danzig’s Evil Bricks ‌(13:21)
• Practical Engineering: The physics behind the thumb trick ‌(17:42)
• How radioactive are bananas? ‌(2:59) — bonus composting factoid content.

Listening:

• Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff — Trying out a new history podcast about progressive people from the past who pushed the needle a bit in the right direction. Started with two episodes of Molly Crabapple talking about the Jewish Bund, which were great, although I’m already aware of the subject matter. Next to try an episode with someone I know nothing about.

Telly:

• Wonder Man

This bush in our garden is covered with bees, which is delightful. At least three different types today, probably more. Of course photographing them in focus is hard.

Status:

Very much a sleepy rest day after yesterday’s crash. Got up late, went back to bed twice, mostly mooched on the internet, watch cartoons and took it easy.

Reading:

• Lasers, hawks and even guns haven’t solved the UK’s pigeon problem. There is a better way — The “better way” is fascinatingly simple: give them a regular spot with food to roost in and replace their eggs with dummies so the population shrinks. Also it’s all our fault: “When humans domesticated pigeons thousands of years ago, we bred them to rely on human care, and some of their natural instincts dwindled with their autonomy. This means they’ve lost the sensibility to ever stop mating, causing them to breed constantly."
• A thread about the local elections in Birmingham — This is really good but sadly the author has set their BlueSky account so you need to log in to read it. This would usually be a dealbreaker (fuck that nonsense) but if you have an account and live in Birmingham it’s worth a read.
• 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets reveal ancient magic rituals from Syria’s lost temple archive — I find this kind of statement fascinating: “These tablets reveal a world in which magic, governance, and knowledge were deeply intertwined. They show how ancient societies confronted uncertainty — not only through administration and law, but through ritual and belief." As if our modern enlightened societies don’t deal with uncertainty through ritual and belief!
• Martin Belam’s one-line spoiler-free movie reviews for April 2026 — Shocked to discover Martin had never seen Akira before now. -10 nerd points, dude.
• “They would never use the Death Star on us”: Alderaan residents reflect on their support for the Empire as a large imperial installation enters the system
• Too self aware for management
• Utilitarianism and Its Enemies

Watching:

• Noah Kalina ‌(25:32)
• When did stories become so centred on good battling evil? And why? ‌(9:00) — Around the time the nation state required mythologies that branded foreigners evil.

Music:

• Give Up by The Postal Service — I played this album a lot back in the day but hadn’t much recently. Of course it’s now on the streaming platforms as a “deluxe” edition which means once the stuff you know is done there’s a load of stuff you maybe don’t know that wasn’t on the album for good reasons. Hate when they do that. But my big new revelation is Ben Gibbard is a winey bitch who should get over it. Thank god for Jen Wood putting him in his place in Nothing Better. Still love the album though.

Telly:

• Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord — And we’re done. That was fun!

Status:

Definitely a crash day, but I think I’m managing it better than I used to. Doesn’t mean it’s fun though. One improvement in my coping is I’m able to identify the waves of ennui as coming from fatigue rather than some kind of depression, so I know they’ll pass with rest.

Reading:

• An excerpt from Anxietyland by Gemma Correll — Eek, relatable.
• I’m a late arrival to short-form video – its effect on my life has shocked me — In the last month I’ve been trying to follow friends on Instagram, because I miss bumping into them in the street, and the experience has been horrible. I will write about it some time but that app is fucking dangerous.
• Ghost is now a digital public good, Ghost being the software I use on my other blog. Digital public goods are pretty interesting, partly because they’re based on an old idea so we’re not reinventing the wheel or anything.

Watching:

• Broken stamp press restoration ‌(18:07)
• Laura Kampf ‌(24:06)

Telly:

• Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord
• The Pitt

Status:

This morning Wally decided to stop eating. Fi took him to vet while I was still asleep because there were some other things she wanted to get checked out. He’s had his recovery food and is fine now, albeit it a little wary having been manhandled.

This afternoon we went to see the show Fi has some work in. It’s a good exhibition with some really good work. Proud of her.

After that excursion I felt pretty burned out, my mind racing and trying to solve things I have no real control over. The usual calming techniques weren’t working so I went to the shed, found a decent piece of wood and started on the monkey fist jig as the rain storm kicked in. Felt much better in my head afterwards, though still pretty tired.

Watching:

• Wayside / Back in Time - Gillian Welch cover ‌(4:17)
• Renovating 165 year old stairs ‌(48:16)
• Could a trillion monkeys write Shakespeare before the universe ends? ‌(16:13) — Never had this thought experiment explained properly before, and nice to see Jade back.

Listening:

• If Books Could Kill: Grit

Looking:

• Caitriona Dunnett’s photography — One of the artists in Fi’s group show, working with alternative photographic processes.

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

Feeling a little weary today but not in a hugely problematic way. Had to massage my amygdala into letting me go to the pharmacy which was a successful trip, even stopping to chat to some friends on the way. Medication collected with no emotional complications.

Roo has asked if I can make her an adjustable monkey fist jig which took a fair bit of looking up to understand what she was even talking about. It looks pretty simple and I have most of the hardware already.

Fi is at the launch of her group show this evening. I decided against going in the end but we’re going to check it out tomorrow.

Reading:

• Urine deflectors — One of the earliest form of hostile architecture, designed to spray piss back on the offending pisser’s legs. via this thread
• Launching a permanent archive for XOXO
• The Quietus’ highlights of Supersonic 2026

Watching:

• The story that changed how I see the meaning of life ‌(39:12) — Like Stories Of Old finds parallels between Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing and the recent film Train Dreams. I loved Train Dreams and it’s stayed with me so this video essay was good brain food.
• Making an anvil out of a railroad rail ‌(19:37)
• Someone tried to kill the president again ‌(9:19) and nobody cares.

Listening:

• In Our Time: Cybernetics

Bookreading:

• Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward — Came recommended by two different people last month and looks like it could be useful. Also, gorgeous cover.

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

Went to York Supplies today, the proper old-school hardware and gardening shop in Kings Heath. It was owned by the sort of people you’d want to own a hardware store, until they retired and sold it to the community as a co-operative, which means I own a share in it along with a few hundred other people. It’s the sort of place where they’ll sell you a single screw if that’s all you need, so of course you buy way more than a single screw. I got some keys cut, a broom handle, some pegs and a bottle of linseed oil. Fi got some double-sided sticky pads, a sprinkler rose for the watering can and a load of seedlings.

I had one of those moments where I slightly annoyed Fi at the counter and then obsessed about it for ages afterwards, until it turned out she’d forgotten about it in seconds. Classic autistic behaviour: “I have gotten this signal wrong in the past so this time I’m not going to ignore it.” Of course the next time I get this signal I’ll likely assume there’s not a problem and carry on oblivious to the other person’s distress. Yay.

A while back someone on my Mastodon feed asked for advice for autistics on meeting new people. I replied with some stuff about being a useful member of your special interest community (that’s how I met everyone in my zine scenes) but later I was thinking about how much of my socialising in my 20s and 30s was done while drunk. I was never an alcoholic, I think, because I rarely had booze at home, but every time I went to a social occasion I’d need a couple of drinks in me before relaxing into long enjoyable conversations. So I guess that’s my really bad advice for autistic people – build up a decent tolerance to alcohol.

It hadn’t really occurred to me until recently but it seems pretty clear that the beer buzz was neutralising all the anxieties about getting stuff wrong, allowing me to take the sort of risks that my sober self would shut down at the horror of. Sure, it could and did go horribly wrong at times, but you can blame that on the booze, especially if everyone else was drinking. Most importantly I made bonds with people, some of whom became friends for life.

Clearly this is not the best way to go about things, but I do wonder when I hear about “the youth of today” being relatively tee-total, how the fuck do they meet new people?

Reading:

• On Compost — Lovely essay by Fraser MacDonald for the LRB on my favourite subject. I was thinking I’d like to write something of this length and tone, and here it is, so I guess I don’t need to anymore (joke, of course I do).
• David Balfe on inspiring Blur’s Country House and tripping on Top of the Pops — I know Balfe from less than flattering portraits in Julian Cope and Bill Drummond’s autobiographies but I didn’t realise he was the fella living in a very big house in the country.
• Key outcomes from first summit on ‘transitioning away’ from fossil fuels — A meeting of “those that wanted something to be done” to avoid the usual bullshit prevaricating by the US, etc. Sounds like a good first step to something important.
• RIP Ted

Listening:

• Origin Story: The European Union pt 1

Music:

• 20 Mothers by Julian Cope — Back in the old days, before piracy and streaming, it was prudent to buy one album by each artist and play it over and over. This was my Julian Cope album. Happy to say it holds up well.

Telly:

• The Pitt

Status:

Big winds today, coming from the east, which is unusual, and quite warm with it so being outside has been both dramatic and pleasant. Rest and digest continues so I’ve mostly been in the hammock, clearing the tabs.

Reading:

• How to make a microbe shirt — This is amazing and quite gorgeous. Cass Marketos has been experimenting with partially composting cotton t-shirts and the result is sort of like tie-die but more mycelium-ish. I also love how the process is unpredictable and can’t be speeded up, making them properly limited. Very keen to try this!
• Social media is now parasocial media — danah boyd, who was there at the beginning and taking notes, on the evolution, naming and subsequent decline of “social media” as a concept. “Attending to parasocial connections may be pleasurable for consumers, but doing so does not strengthen the collective social fabric. It is possible to experience loneliness despite spending hours emotionally engaged with others’ dramas if those interactions are not reciprocated." I keep circling a conclusion that fascism wins when we don’t talk to our friends and neighbours.
• ‘People assume we’re grifters’: disabled Britons report rise in abuse over blue badges — No-one’s said “you don’t look disabled” to me yet, but then I rarely leave the house. As I start to venture out I fully expect some Daily Mail-pilled eejit to come at me. Fun times.
• Withnail’s Coat & I — A deliriously long and obsessive account of the tailoring and subsequent life of Richard E Grant’s big coat.
• I kind of fixed my iCloud Photos problem and all I got was two blog posts and probably years off my life.
• Parkrun and other sports bodies threatened with legal action over transgender inclusion — The American far-right evangelical anti-abortionists are coming. Here’s a campaign against them.
• A Spring Meander : Yr golygfa o Hescwm Uchaf, rhif 30

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Building a Giant Log Grapple for the Volvo L120 loader EP2 - Finishing Main Body ‌(1:52:23)

Telly:

• Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord
• This Is a Gardening Show with Zach Galifianakis

Status:

Definitely a rest and digest day after last night’s relative excitements. No energy for a hustings write-up though, sadly. Plenty of pottering around the garden plus a surprise visit from Roo.

Fi’s artwork is in a group show launching on Friday and I’m wondering if I might be able to attend. In recent years this sort of this has been a total no-go but I know the venue and I know the quiet spots. It’s probably not going to happen (we can go when it’s quieter) but the fact that I’m contemplating it is notable.

Reading:

• Meet the young Wikipedians writing the front page of music history — Getting flashbacks to 2004 when I made loads of pages for obscure underground cartoonists and zines which were rapidly deleted as not notable. Good on these kids for not backing down in their quest to create pages for all the music sub-sub-genres you’ve never heard of. “Then there’s Kelechi Wisdom, a 20-year-old from Manchester known as Aradicus, who’s significantly contributed to the Wikipedia presence of basically every 2020s uber-online microgenre (dariacore, hexD, digicore) as well as older sounds that didn’t have pages or much detail (landfill indie, recession pop, shitgaze). He’s spent 1,000 hours grinding Wikipedia since last July, essentially speedrunning the underground."
• Do I belong in tech anymore? — I’m seeing two kinds of people using the autocomplete coding tools: amateurs and hobbyists doing fun, non-essential projects like home automation and website building, and hardened professional coders who are losing their fucking minds. This is one of the latter.

Watching:

• (Gimme Some of That) Ol' Atonal Music - Merle Hazard feat. Alison Brown ‌(3:31) — “Hard to sing if you rehearse, impossible by sight”
• I Love Boosters trailer ‌(2:06) — New Boots Riley movie klaxon! This looks super good.
• Bald Eagle live nest cam — When I tuned in one of the eagles flew in with a big stick and the other was like “what I am supposed to do with this?” and I was reminded of when I’d go skip-diving and bring some random piece of furniture back which Fiona would have to figure out where to put, or when Fiona sees some giveaway on the street chat which winds up in our corridor for a week.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — And we’re done! At least until July.

Status:

Went to the Stirchley ward council election hustings tonight which was… interesting, I guess? I think I have a clearer idea of who to vote for now, which is the point, but I also have thoughts. Will see how I feel tomorrow but a hustings report blog post might be forthcoming.

Reading:

• The Angine de Poitrine Argument for universal basic income — Starts with the usual UBI arguments but I was happy to see the importance of the environment these artists and scientists are immersed in. I had a period in my 30s of living on fuckall income with plenty of free time and it only worked when I had some kind of structure, mentorship or community around me. Similarly my art career in my 40s was productive when I felt supported by the Birmingham scene but less so when I felt adrift from it.
• Do stronger borders ever work? — What’s that rule that the answer to a question in a headline is always no? The author’s book, Along the Borders, looks interesting, travelling along the myriad borders of the British Isles. ‌"Nationalities are often strongest on the border, where people define themselves in opposition to their neighbours. Flags fly, dialects become stronger, and the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ grows. But borderlands are also the spaces in between, where centuries of history and culture merge and collide to create complex and shifting identities."
• The Prepper Delusion 🪜 — “You might think that after all of this I’d have a go bag always ready. But I don’t. What I’ve learned, across every one of these close calls and near misses, is that what keeps us safe isn’t the stuff we pack or stockpile; it’s the community we build before calamity strikes."
• Adam Greenfield on rediscovering role-playing games — I love that he went to Orcs Nest in London, a shop I believe I was at the opening of in 1987 (with schoolmate Phil who got me into gaming while I got him into comics) and which I’m amazed is still there. My history with the form is similar to Adams, spending far too much on Warhammer miniatures (back when they were made of metal) and never really playing with them. It was a strange chapter, one I never really revisit, although it did give me my first contact with zines…

Wishlisting:

• This Year – 365 Songs Annotated by John Darnielle — Don’t need it, can’t afford it, but a 500+ page book by the Mountain Goats guy about the stories behind the Mountain Goats songs… yes please.

Reposting:

• Pete’s zine timeline — Recovered from the Bugpowder Zine Archive, a chronology of my teenage discovery of zines in the 80s and my involvement with them through the 90s before fading away in the 2000s. Was thinking about this after reading Adam’s piece above and wanted to bring it back as I’m quite pleased with it. May well flesh it out more over time.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Status:

Got out of the house this afternoon for a “walk” on my scooter with Fi and great-neph M. M called it my ATV which caused some snorts and it’s definitely not all terrain. Maybe one terrain, two at most, as long as there are no steep hills. But we did go off-road through the woodland next to the river, the path being reasonably traversable thanks to the lack of rain, and it was very nice to see all the trees and stuff.

Later I sorted out our recycling for Fi to take to the tip tomorrow. Being Birmingham residents our general rubbish is being collected but we haven’t had a recycling refuse collection in over a year now. We don’t produce that much waste, being a child-free couple on a budget, so it’s not been a problem like it has for some people we know, but after a couple of months our wheelie bin doth begin to overfloweth.

It doesn’t need to be sorted into paper, metal, plastic and glass, but I like to do it. One of my favourite random jobs in my 30s was working on the bins and I’ve had a long-standing fascination with how societies deal with their detritus and respect for those who do it. Going through the contents of our bin also felt like an accounting of our consumption, which feels like a good thing to be aware of.

Reading:

• Software brains & statistical engines — ‌Patel basically proposes a version of Alfred Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory,” that “the word is not the thing.” The database is always a simplification of the territory it models, and at some point every database stops matching reality. His insight was that we routinely confuse our representations of things with the things themselves and act on the map as though it were the world. Software brain takes this confusion as its operating premise: when the map and the territory diverge, the response is to change the territory, not the map. Asking people to make themselves legible to AI is that inversion turned into a business model. — Making yourself legible to system outside of your control that don’t have your best interests at heart strikes me as the main reason we send kids to school.
• The disappearance of the public bench — Delightfully long and comprehensive article about public seating infrastructure which I’m enjoying slowly reading. As someone who now can’t walk further than 100m without needing to sit down I have really come to appreciate the benches in my local park and note their absence elsewhere.

Listening:

• Real Vikings — Not sure I’d necessarily recommend this but I am listening to it, mostly to send myself to sleep, so it deserves a mention. (I already know my Viking lore thanks to watching the gloriously schlocky Vikings TV show and then binging Wikipedia to fill the many gaps.)

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — The episode where Bunny Colvin from The Wire stops by.
• This Is a Gardening Show with Zach Galifianakis — So, so very good and criminally short.

Status:

A rest day, spent mostly in the garden because it’s lovely out there, thinking my thoughts and wondering my… wonds.

Reading:

• What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat 🪜 — by Noah Hawley, TV guy behind Fargo, Legion et al. “This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes."
• The Landscape – On what meets you when you come forward with a sexual abuse story — Do better, fellow men.
• Inside Chornobyl: 40 years after disaster, nuclear site still at risk in Russia’s war — There are many arguments for and against nuclear power stations and “what if it finds itself on the frontline of a war” is certainly one of them.
• Jessamyn’s drop-in tech clinic — Jessamyn runs a drop-in at her library for people with tech problems and does an eye-opening accounting of it each time. It’s just a litany of problems ordinary people have with technology. Anyone working in that field should be forced to do this on a regular basis.

Conferencing:

• Kate Crawford – Mapping Empires — When I was an artist poking at AI systems in the mid 2010s Crawford was one of the people I paid attention to for a clear and concise critique of where this stuff might end up. As I drifted away from the subject I didn’t keep up with her work so when she was mentioned in Sentiers as having done a talk for the Long Now foundation I was curious. Long Now is one of those Stewart Brand-related ventures that on the surface seem really cool but which are wrapped up in all manner of libertarian Californian Ideology nonsense, so what was Kate doing there? Turns out she’s playing the role of the outside provocateur, as evidenced by the subsequent Q&A with Kevin Kelly where his west coast tech-optimism meets her New York media theory cynicism. Anyway, the talk is based around Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500, an infographic artwork which tries to reframe our present moment as part of a much longer historical arc, and serves a similar purpose in reframing the AI discourse from the perspective of someone who’s been thinking about this for a very long time. I’ve had a tendency to filter out any and all AI stuff in recent years because I find its outputs fundamentally ugly and boring and the debates around it asinine, but Kate might have made the subject interesting to me again.

Music:

• B(if)tek — Kate Crawford’s electro-pop band from when she was in her 20s.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Big Mistakes — Fun with moments of audacity and a fab cast but didn’t quite hit the mark overall. Would like to give it four stars but I think it’s going to have to be three.

Status:

The post-exertional crash came, but of course it was a bit weird and didn’t make sense. Last night I went to bed feeling OK but just couldn’t get to sleep – no wired anxiety, just boringly awake. Eventually I nodded off at 7am and then woke up about 11 after a stress dream with a splitting headache and chronic fatigue legs, had a really grumpy few hours and then it cleared in the afternoon. Right now I’m feeling fine I guess (?) but have no idea what’s going on because it doesn’t map anything that’s happened before. All I know is I probably should rest for a few days.

While resting I got a delivery of a copy of Desmond Morris' 1977 book Manwatching which I’d found for a fiver. It looks like it’s come straight from my childhood bookshelves, leading me to wonder if it’s the same copy (the price is snipped from the corner of the jacket in the same way my mother would do) but I’m sure it’s not. I had a skim through it in the garden and it seems to hold up remarkably well with a lot of photos from the Magnum archive, which explains why they stuck with me. I wish I’d had it to hand when I was doing work around gestures humans make to interact with machines, riffing off the late Nicholas Nova’s book Curious Rituals which fed directly into the mess that was Instructions for Humans. It’d be fun to see how much of my fascination with that was seeded by Morris.

When I was at the allotment, sowing the seeds of my fatigue crash, I was chatting to sister Lucy about Manwatching and she had exactly the same memories of discovering it on the bookshelf and being obsessed with this portal to another way of thinking, albeit three or so years after me.

I’ve been thinking about things I might write about at length over time and a proper dive into this book is becoming a good candidate, not so much for whether it’s a good book but for what it meant to me. I wonder if any other Gen X kids have memories of it.

Reading:

• Iron Maiden on 50 years of heavy metal, hard living – and hopeless communication skills — I was never a Maiden fan but a bunch of my mates were so I have a peripheral awareness of their impact. I have this amusing memory of when the fashion suddenly changed from double-denim to big shorts, though I think that was more Anthrax? Like I say, not really my thing.
• How the heck does Shazam work? — I kinda knew this due to my curiosity about machine learning a decade ago which uses a similar idea of reducing a noisy signal to a short string of numbers, but it’s good to see it spelled out in plain English and is, I think, fairly similar to how human brains do pattern matching.
• Trump’s war on the global food supply
• The South Bank skatepark turns 50

Watching:

• The thing that threw me the most about neurotypical living was their homes. ‌(2:00) — Much identification here, but when did “neurotypical” become the go-to for what used to be “normie” or “straight”? Do people still talk about “the straights” in a non-gender way? (Growing up in Croydon we had neighbours who were like this who my mum called the “The Borings”. Yes she could be a bit of snob, but they really were.)

Listening:

• Doomscroll: Natalie Wynn: How Online Politics Became Real Life — Looooong 3 hour conversation with the video essayist Contrapoints which flew by and I got a lot out of. Wynn is above all a trained philosopher who realised she could do more fun philosophy stuff outside of the academy and this really comes across in her thought processes. She gets a lot of flack but, transphobia/misogyny aside, I think it’s because she can’t not unpick a flawed argument, and righteous people can’t cope with that. I’m also getting rather fond of host Joshua Citarella’s mission to figure out how the left can fight back by talking to as many people as possible and working through his ideas in public. You can see he knows it’s a herculean task and he’s taking it one step at a time.

Music:

• Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem — A mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the TP theme, with a lovely video of clips from seasons 1 and 2, which I really do need to rewatch sometime.

Purchasing:

• Badges from Delicious Creative — These popped up on my Mastodon feed and on a whim I ordered a bunch. Turned out my order was #2 and she’d just started selling them! They arrived midweek and are really nice quality. I went for the Reject set, the trans flag and a Fuck AI. Now I just need to go outside so other people can see them. (If any local friends who still walk the streets want one for free, hit me up.)

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Status:

I had a thought about managing the compost at the allotment so sent it to my sister who suggested we meet up there and have a chat. Which turned into actioning the plan and emptying one full bay into another. Lucy did most of the work but I couldn’t help getting a bit involved (this was my big passion pre-CFS!) and we’ll see if I overdid it or managed it well.

The compost it looking good considering it’s missing a lot of the food inputs I used to get from friends and Loaf so is mainly rabbit poop and hay alongside the usual allotment detritus. Some patches at the bottom were a bit anaerobic and stinky but that’s to be expected.

I’ve been thinking about trying to do some longer-form writing and how I might make that work alongside this blog. Looking back at the early efforts it’s grown a lot so can certainly be pruned back, and I might go to 3 times a week, using the time I’m habitually writing to focus on something else. Will see.

Reading:

• Half of Europe’s towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago — These maps are quite eye-opening, especially in Spain. At the bottom is a zoomable map and you can get right down to local districts.
• Eye on Moseley’s local election hustings – 2026 — ‌It’s no exaggeration to say that this is likely to be one of the most consequential Council elections that Birmingham has seen in over 20 years. As a result, you’d expect no holding back as candidates play for what is the highest-stakes game in local government, control of one of the largest local authorities in Europe. If this is what you are expecting, please manage your disappointment now.
• James Bridle’s introduction to anarchism — in response to a Guardian journalist that got confused about how mutual aid works.
• Is this thing on? — My chum Matt has started blogging again after a year off.
• Firefox’s new boss has a very old-school plan: ‘build a better browser’ — Firefox is my browser of choice (well, to be honest I have so many plugins running switching would be a massive ball ache) and I mostly come across people moaning about parent company Mozilla in my feeds, so while this is totally a PR hype piece it’s good to read about what they think they’re doing.
• You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze — Whenever I read about someone doing something amazing with a commercial AI service (like this, for example) I do wonder how much it would cost if they actually charged properly. It seems we’re soon to find out.

Watching:

• Prince & 3RDEYEGIRL - Lets Go Crazy ‌(6:25) — Live in Manchester, 2014
• Torbjörn Åhman blacksmithing - making BIG industrial tongs ‌(22:05) — Bonus giant-chainmaking factory at the end.
• XOXO archive — All the videos and associated gubbins from the self-described “experimental festival for independent artists and creators from the internet”.

Listening:

• Adam Buxton podcast ep.269 - Jamie Hewlett & Damon Albarn AKA Gorillaz — Listened mainly for Hewlett who I sort-of met (in that he signed my comics) back in the Deadline days when I was a spoddy teen and he can’t have been more than 20, but haven’t really kept up with since the 90s. Nice to get a hint of how he and Albarn co-author the Gorillaz albums.

Researching:

• Did some digging into the plug-in solar plans for the UK. British Gas (irony alert) have a good guide to what’s coming and what it means for homes, this is the government press release, and this is a mercifully short video by a calm man explaining how it works.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Status:

A pottering day today, mostly in the garden, tidying up the pile of prunings I wasn’t able to mulch the other day.

Reading:

• Node Star: Own the Internet — A plain-language guide to setting up a mesh network in your neighbourhood. I’ve been vaguely away of these for years and did notice an uptick in chatter but this is the first time I’ve seen something that explained it simply and clearly. It’s giving me the same buzz I got from blogging and Twitter back in the day, like this could be right at the intersection of interesting and useful and fun. I see there are no nodes in Birmingham so it’d be starting from scratch but I think the People’s Republic of Stirchley would be a good test-bed. Could stick a node on the roof of the new building and take it from there.
• Shambala to become UK’s first employee-owned music festival — I’ve never been to Shambala but the folks who run it used to run Jibbering Records in Moseley with a little corner cafe where I did my blogging a couple of decades ago. I happened to look them up the other month and was delighted to see it’s still the same crew (and that I might have even gone to their first night, Africa Jam, with my old mate Suzi back in the 90s) so it’s great to see they’re cementing the legacy and going with a co-operative ownership model.
• Free plug-in solar panels to be rolled out to some households — This is very exciting, specifically the bit about regulations being changed by the summer. Installing ‘proper’ solar on our house roof is a bit too much of an investment but we could slap a few of these on the rabbit shed, or hang them from the south-facing fence, and plug them straight into the house circuit with no major hassle. And given our income has plummeted since my CFS we might even be eligible for the support scheme.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Building a giant log grapple for the Volvo L120 loader ep1 - The base ‌(2:23:23)

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Big Mistakes

Is that a rabbit jumping out of that tree?

Status:

Slept in and pretty much marked today as a rest day, though it hasn’t been the crash I was fearing. Realised I haven’t had a proper crash now for a week, though it feels like longer, which is a warning sign in itself. How I feel at any given point is not an accurate measure of how I actually am.

Found myself wondering today about what being recovered from CFS would be like and if this is a hint of it. I feel a different kind of tired today – the ‘normal’ kind where you do an exertion and your body recovers from it. CFS-tired is feeling exhausted disproportionately to the exertion, or without any exertion at all. Today I just feel like someone who hasn’t done any exercise for a couple of years and then did a thing, which implies I can improve by doing some exercise.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m better. It’s been a week and CFS has a habit of coming in waves. There’s a very good chance I’ll be fucked again soon and all this ‘progress’ will feel undone. But right now I see a glimmer of hope and by the gods I’m going to grab onto it while it’s there.

Reading:

• Grievance poisoning in the first degree — The technofascist overtones of the Palantir manifesto have bubbled up into the mainstream discourse over contracts with the UK government, and this is good to see. These bastards should not be let anywhere near our stuff. But it’s worth noting how intellectually bankrupt and philosophically idiotic their whole thing is. “This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at — given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect." See also Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto.
• Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt review – life after Paul Auster — I was reading Paul Auster before I discovered him and his wife were super-hot.
• What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’ — ‌Though Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, it was the murder of 6 million Jews that turned it from a pipe dream into a viable political project – one that has always combined two key strands, Bartov said. “One is a settler-colonial, ethno-national movement, and the other is the liberation and emancipation and rescue of a persecuted minority.” If the Jews had had a state of their own, the case went, they would have escaped this unspeakable horror, he said, “and this was not an entirely vacuous argument”.
• Mazdak creates Utopia — I saw a comment about this saying all these comics are basically the same: historic guy invents socialism/democracy/etc, is killed for it. Yup!

Watching:

• Image Empire ‌(3:36) — Short film introducing a new work by Alan Warburton whose work I really admired a decade or so back but lost touch with as I moved away from the digi-art space. The film is a really clear and accessible introduction to some important themes around data capture and how we conceive of reality, and I’m going to enjoy reading the field guide that accompanies it. (Also I really like how the rabbit motif in the video calls back to one of Warburton’s earlier works, and a big favourite of mine, Dust Bunny.)
• Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble ‌(3:17)
• Practical Engineering: The wild story of the Teton Dam failure ‌(19:22)
• Vintage Culbuto game restoration ‌(14:26)

Music:

• Philophobia by Arab Strap — Had the urge to listen to some of their earlier stuff and this brought back memories of being a confused 20-something making dumb drunken emotional mistakes with other confused 20-somethings.

Bookreading:

• Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch — Revisiting for the completion of the story this summer.
• Manwatching by Desmond Morris — I grabbed a bootleg scan from a shadow library (look at me, all darkwebwarrior) and enjoyed seeing images I’d not seen since I was 10 or so. Published in 1977 it’s obviously dated badly in places but has an optimism and seemingly a determination to see the whole of humanity as one coherent species. It’s also surprisingly explicit for something my mother left on the bottom shelf and presumably knew I was accessing. I wonder if would we let great-neph M read this? (Caveat - I’ve been skimming and not reading the copy in depth.)

Telly:

• Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord — I’m always amazed at how much more exciting and visceral these cartoons are compared with the staid and plodding live action series. Also, bonus Richard Ayoade on Brit-droid-voice-acting duty.