Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Status:

Went for a walk in the park. An actual walk, not on the scooter. Effectively a tour of the benches in the park, of which there are thankfully a decent number. Made it to the allotment and had a sit.

Need to record that today was pretty heavy on the ennui and sadness re: the chronic fatigue. This will pass, and it was less heavy than it’s been. But even so.

Feel like something needs to change in how I’m doing days. This may also pass but I’m marking it in case it doesn’t.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. - The year civilization collapsed: by Eric H. Cline - have reached the bit about the Hittite king Suppiluliuma and while all the names from this period are a bit odd to modern ears, listening to a historian eruditely say “Suppiluliuma” over and over is quite something.

Music:

• Bill Callahan: My Days of 58 - new album klaxon! It’s very good, as expected, and feels like a bit of departure from recent albums, more introspective and self-referential, if that’s possible.

Reading:

• The death of Spotify: Why streaming is minutes away from being obsolete - I feel like ever since Spotify launched I’ve been reading articles about what it all means (though that might be because my friend Craig spent a while studying it) but this one is kinda interesting, despite opening with a cringe anecdote. Like most things it’s about who has the power and control.
• Ten years of Cold War Steve
• Matt Haughey: Random bits and bobs
• An expat in Dubai has a startling revelation - Stephen Collins knocks it out of the park.
• ‘Cultural monstrosities!’ The thrilling visual legacy of punk and post-punk

Watching:

• Tick Stick: The carpentry tool that does the impossible ‌(13:06)
• Practical Engineering: Earthquake-Proof Foundations ‌(18:03)
• What if you floated upwards 1 ft every second? ‌(2:52)
• HyperCard changed everything ‌(11:02)

Telly:

• English Teacher

Status:

The sun is out and all my friends are going on about how the sun is out with big smiles on their faces (or big smiley emojis, because let’s face it I don’t see people in person much these days). I’m happy for them but can’t share their unbridled enthusiasm. Sure, it’s nice to be outside when it’s warm and not-wet, and as someone who gets up late I’m looking forward to lighter evenings, but I’ve never been one of those people that gets SAD. I’m this grumpy all year round.

I think today would normally have been a crash day as it had some of the signs. But it wasn’t a crash day. I can cautiously say I’m flattening the curve (to coin a phrase) on my boom and bust cycle.

I’m mildly obsessing over how annoyed I was with the first two episodes of Paradise, so much so I’m tempted to watch it out of spite. Hopefully I’ll get over this soon.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. - The year civilization collapsed: by Eric H. Cline

Reading:

• Catherine Opie and her astonishing photographs of queer America. - that photo of Diana Nyad is amazing.
• 25 years of iPod brain - I could (and maybe should) write a short book about how mp3s changed how I engaged with music over the 2000s, and how that suddenly stoped with effects I’m not too happy about.
• Why attack Iran? - “Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration, one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis."
• The last idiot who earnestly believes in the American Experiment. (via) and Learn With Ms Rachel review – undoubtedly the TV event of the year for millions of us - both of these address something I’ve been pondering today. Why do we teach kids a very specific distinction of right and wrong and then, as they turn into adults, do everything we can to dissuade them of this?
• Intelligent Life of Earth - “The more something is repeated, the more true it is. It’s why propaganda is so successful."

Clearing the tabs

I’ve had these open in my browser for over a week but haven’t had the capacity to digest them properly for posting above, so I’m declaring bankruptcy and posting them un-read. Having skimmed the intros I’m pretty sure they’re worth reading, but even so, click at your own risk.

• A.I. Isn’t People - How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?
• How did we end up threatening our kids’ lives with AI? and Taking action against AI harms by Anil Dash
• “In 2016, there was no way any of us could have charged for a link round-up.” - Delia Cai, writer of Deez Links
• What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit
• Will Fungi Thwart the Destructive Rise of the Anthropocene?
• The Kingdom of Misfits
• What does it mean to make something?
• New Ferality - Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
• Centrist imaginations - on Bari Weiss and The Free Press
• Fifty Years Ago, Kraftwerk Talked Tape, Paranoia and the Human Machine
• Another London, by Hari Kunzru - Excavating the disenchanted city
• Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?
• The Slow Death of the Power User
• What is a token - AI is meant to seem like magic. But there’s no such thing as magic. It’s all illusion. So, allow me to spoil that illusion for you.
• Actually, the left is winning the AI debate

Watching:

• Noah Kalina: Holes in the Archive ‌(20:57) - talking about the Farm Security Administration photo archive.
• GERALD YOUTUBE VIDEO ‌(19:45) - Twenty minutes of Gerald potting on his seedlings.

Telly:

• English Teacher
• The Knick

Status:

Rest day, mostly. Slept long and did some light pottering around the house. Feeling OK.

Family member is having a clear-out and asked me to sell a bunch of their books on one of those “scan them and we pick them up” services. Only a third of them were accepted and that box came to £20, about £2 per kilo. Every little counts but it really feels like books have no value outside of collector markets. I can’t be too upset – I very rarely buy physical books these days unless I want to support the author. Reading in medium where I can change the font and type size is much more preferable. At the same time I’m getting interested in print and physical publications as alternatives to an increasingly flakey and fractured internet, so there’s an interesting tension there.

Overnight listening:

• Lifepod: Pirate Care, with Valeria Graziano & Tomislav Medak - quite an intense conversation about some deep topics, maybe too much for a 1am listen so I’m glad to see there’s a transcript. Related links: Pirate Care website, book and their previous project the Memory of the World shadow library.

Reading:

• John Harris: Labour is stubborn in defeat because it knows this: we face the belated end of the political 20th century. - It’s interesting that Labour’s best hope seems to be some combination of Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan. Almost as if the mayoral system is producing politicians who known how to govern while Westminster just isn’t fit for purpose.
• Zürich turned its rooftops into a climate shield. - “We must again live in houses where nature is above us, for it is our duty to put nature, which we destroy by building the house, back on the roof. The nature we have on the roof is this piece of earth that we killed by putting the house there."

Watching:

• Laura Kampf: The perfect lamp ‌(28:20)

Telly:

• English Teacher
• The Knick - The medical historical show from a decade back, directed, shot and edited by Soderbergh, and brought to my attention by this CinemaStix video.

Status:

My oldest contiguous friend Jez came over to visit today. While we’re always in touch I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and it was really lovely. Probably spent too long chatting (90 minutes is way over my limit for conversations) but fuck it, eh?

Definitely needed a nap afterwards, which was broken by whoever does the BBC’s Mindful Mix programming Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 an hour in. Brief Encounter angst is certainly a wake up call.

Overnight listening:

• Lifepod: An introduction to Lifepod - Adam setting out his stall and reading a section of the book. Looking forward to the first proper episode tonight.

Music:

• Ministry Trax! Box - Ninety early tracks by Ministry including side projects Revolting Cocks, Pailhead, 1000 Homo DJs, PTP and Acid Horse. I remember some of these bleeding into my consciousness as a curious youth via the goths in my circles. Amusingly that 1000 Homo DJs version of Supernaut was my first exposure to Sabbath - it was years before I heard the original.

Reading:

• Timothy Snyder: Fascist failure - Positing that Trump is actually shite at doing fascism properly, not that this leaves us in a better place.
• Laurie Penny: Temporarily embarrassed sex criminals - Useful reminder that “patriarchy” doesn’t mean rule by men, it means rule by the father, the patriarch.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Finishing the Roller Deck & moving it out of the workshop ‌(2:48:33)
• Nerdwriter: What’s jazz doing in A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms? ‌(10:14)

Telly:

• English Teacher
• Paradise - OK, this is utter bobbins. Barely made it through the second episode. Avoid, avoid.

Yes, rabbits literally shit where they eat. They’re little poop production lines.

Status:

Grumpy Pete has left the building for now. Having a rest day to be sure. Did laundry, finished off setting up the online shopping, had a nap.

A lot of the links I post here are about the rising fascist threat and what we can do to protect ourselves from it (see Lifepod below, for example) so it would be churlish not to mention today’s by-election victory by the Greens, bloodying the nose of Reform and giving Labour a much needed reality check. The Greens are not perfect by any stretch but they’re clearly on the right side of the fight.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Columbian Exchange - Being the exchange of foodstuffs and germs when Europeans and Americans first met. Quickly reframed as “less an exchange, more a massacre” and has some interesting stuff about climate change from population loss and the changes in European diets fuelling the Industrial Revolution. Reminded me of a bit in The Dawn Of Everything that Rousseau’s enlightenment ideas were influenced by indigenous practices encountered by settlers, specifically the Wendat chief Kondiaronk, which was sadly not mentioned.

Reading:

• Weird Pride in a hostile world. - It seems Weird Pride Day is 4th March. This is a manifesto which I can pretty much get behind.
• ‘A gift that falls from the sky’: why farmers are using Etna’s ash as fertiliser. - Funny that this is framed as a recent discovery as I remember learning as a child that the land around volcanos is highly fertile, although I get that excess ash is probably a short term problem.
• First ice cream van of the year 2026.
• Scholar, seductress, alchemist: who was the real Cleopatra? - Author wants to write about Cleopatra, realises she’ll never know anything accurate about Cleopatra so writes about herself in her place. Which, of course, is how history is written, crafting narratives from available facts that tell us stories about ourselves in the here and now.
• Ador Oh No! - On leaning into contradictory music.

Subscribing:

• Lifepod - Adam Greenfield has extended his Lifehouse book (which I very much enjoyed last year) into an ongoing podcast. He introduces it here. Will be checking it out tonight.
• Here’s a big list of indie media for you - Garbage Day collects a bunch of sites, blogs and newsletters which are attempting to fill the gap left by the evisceration of news media. A lot I recognise, many I don’t and will check out as I’ve been wanting to diversify my inputs of late. (Also, this sort of thing reminds of how every year or so the underground cartoonists du jour would put together an anthology of their work, maybe through Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly, which meant they were no longer underground and it was time to start hunting out the next bunch of hungry kids doing zines. So who’s out there?)

Watching:

• The waterwheel gearbox failed catastrophically ‌(37:27)

Telly:

• English Teacher - Catching up on the second season. I’d forgotten how mad this is. It’s like the teaching staff from Glee on meth.
• Paradise - Really not sure if this is bobbins or not. It’s definitely setting off my bobbins alarms.

Status:

Feeling pretty grumpy today, having the annoying feelings and the headaches that go with them. It’ll pass but I’m no fun to be around.

Spent a bit of time today setting up online shopping with Morrisons, our local supermarket, to take some of the shopping chores away from Fi. You would think you’d be able to scan the barcodes of the stuff in your cupboard, but no, you have to search for each item individually. I’m going to blame this on Morrisons being bought by asset-stripping private equity goons. Still, it kept my mind occupied for a while.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: 15-Minute Cities – How urban design entered the culture war - kinda delightful to hear grumpy old Ian Dunt be totally won over by the 15-minute city concept. The gendered nature of the opposition is kinda obvious but hadn’t really occurred to me.

Music:

• The Disintegration Loops - revisiting after yesterday’s article and this really is a remarkable piece of work. I can totally picture William Basinski blasting it out of the speakers on his roof knowing he’s got something important but not knowing exactly what it is until the twin towers fell. Well worth your time.

Reading:

• We need to talk about naked mole rats.
• Right about the problems but hilariously, tragically wrong about the solutions - back atcha, matey.

Watching:

• Africa (Toto)…but it lists every country in Africa ‌(1:41)
• Colin Furze: Secret Garage Update #18 Loverly Legs ‌(40:57) - Colin can be a bit much but I do enjoy his second channel where he goes into more detail about what he’s building.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Status:

Feeling OK today but keen not to push anything too far - the tinnitus is hovering like a coalmine canary. Want to get back to a full rested state before I start pottering too prescriptively but I can’t just do nothing. So I went to the pharmacist on my wee scooter to pick up my prescriptions, a nice flat journey along the river in the sunshine. Well, apart from the bits of the path where the tree roots are bursting through. That’s a fecking nightmare on three wheels.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: How To Survive The End of The World - the regular presenters, William and Anita, are starting to annoy me so this podcast is not long for my world. But it’s been a good ride and introduced me to some new things about the ancient Middle East.

Music:

• Black Box Recorder - they’re back, apparently. I have a memory of housemates being a bit worried I was listening to Child Psychology on repeat but that album got me through a tricky time. The albums hold up well and the third one (which I didn’t know well) is quite odd in places.

Reading:

• Populism is an information problem, but not in the way that you think - looking at John Harris' recent reporting from Denton and comparing his findings with Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine.
• Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ - I find Brand fascinating not just because he’s a kind of Zelig figure, appearing in the background of loads of things I’m interested in, but because he’s so often right about the problems but hilariously, tragically wrong about the solutions, believing the worst people in the world will save us.
• Molly Soda’s Desktop Diary #12 - “The process of transcribing something forces you to go inward, to give that thing your full attention, whether you want to or not."
• Tear Gun by Yi-Fei Chen - “Collects and freezes actual tears to shoot them back at the person who caused the cry." I feel like this sort of tech-art has disappeared in the last decade or so. I’m sure I used to see more of this kind of thing.
• Nick Land, Silicon Valley’s favorite doomsaying philosopher 🪜 - Another deluded weirdo from the past who should have drifted into obscurity but has been dragged back into the light by far-right tech capitalists. If you squint, the yin to Stewart Brand’s optimistic yang.
• How The Disintegration Loops became a requiem for the 9/11 attacks - Beautiful interview with William Basinski and Anohni about the 90s New York avant-garde queer scene that produced “one of the most important musical recordings of the 21st century.”

Watching:

• Sort through my potatoes with me ‌(3:13) - I did not know you could cut chitting potatoes in pieces and grow from them…
• Datsun L28 carb swap - filling injector ports with laser welding ‌(9:51) - I have no interest in cars but I do like watching people fix bits of them.

Telly:

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast - Five stars, excellent. Utterly bananas and held it together right to the end.

Status:

I wouldn’t say today was a crash exactly but it had some of the symptoms of a crash. Mostly the fight-flight bullshit of feeling like there’s a threat everywhere, which is the normal CFS response to being exhausted. But at the same time it’s not as severe as it’s been and I’m not incoherent or physically wiped out. So I’ve done 3.5 days of pottering which has resulted in a milder than usual crash. Also I’m aware of what’s going on and what I need to do to mitigate it - breath in such a way as to trick my parasympathetic nervous system into rest-and-digest mode. I’d say that’s progress.

Overnight listening:

• Alvin Lucier: Sounds unheard - If there’s one piece of art that, once I’d experienced it, helped contextualise everything I’d done before and informed everything in my subsequent art practice it’s Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. It ticks so many of my boxes so this hour long programme about his background, influences (Fluxus, of course!) and then playing the whole piece uninterrupted, is divine. It makes me want to make space-specific work again.

Music:

• Low, specifically the last two albums, Hey What and Double Negative, which I realised I’d not spend as much time with as I might have. They are, of course, marvellous.

Reading:

• My maddening battle with chronic fatigue syndrome: ‘On my worst days, it feels almost demonic’ - I got a lot out of this personal account of having ME/CFS by Hermione Hoby (a veteran of The Awl, so OK in my book) with a scary amount of recognition of the various stages and symptoms. The “brain retraining” stuff is interesting as it relates slightly to the advice I’m getting from the NHS, albeit with significantly lower expectations and way less wellness woo, for which I’m grateful. Whenever I’m exhausted my brain think’s I’m in danger and triggers responses that are exhausting, and I’m stuck in a feedback loop. Since the brain is just another lump of meat in my skin-sack it can be trained to do the right thing, right? Anyway, recommended for people trying to understand CFS, theirs or others, even if her ultimate conclusion is “illness is meaningless, random – it happens to all of us, to varying degrees, and it simply sucks.”
• Fix Your Hearts or Die - “The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism."

Telly:

• University Challenge
• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Status:

Feeling a little weary today so lowered the pottering quotient.

We ran out of hay for the rabbits and needed to do a run to the horse food shop out in the countryside, which is always fun. Fi was busy and I’m still not driving (don’t trust myself with the fatigue) so my sister did the honours. It’s a journey out of Birmingham so we move through the various iterations of suburbia until suddenly crossing the edge of the city into farms and fields. I had an idea for a photography project once, to visit these “edgelands” where the urban snaps into the rural, and see what I could find. I was also reminded of doing the Trailblazers project in 2016 at a school based on the edge of Birmingham with kids who lived this curious life both of the city and of the countryside. I wonder what happened to those kids? They must be in their mid 20s now.

On returning with two bales and wheeling them to the shed I decided that was enough for today. Not a full rest day but a cautious withdrawing from the fray.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline

Music:

• The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - (Thanks Eric)

Reading:

• They built Stepford AI and called it “Agentic” - So much to say about this brilliant piece but I’ll just say the use of the four female characters from Mad Men as archetypes for AI models is pure chef’s kiss. (I’ve always contended Mad Men was a horror show about the original sins of our present time, despite what its creator thinks.)
• Gambling the future into existence - Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends on Substack’s disconcerting move into prediction markets (ie, gambling on the news).
• Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking - Sam Kriss visits the strange young men running the current crop of startups in San Francisco and it’s quite a wild ride. Paul Raven is calling Kris “the Hunter Thompson of his era” which I think I’d agree with. He’s certainly the Hunter Thompson we deserve. (A while after reading I was struck by how I’ve known people like these guys and might even have been one of them when younger - awkward, overly-confident weirdos fabricating ideologies in isolation. It’s probably a stage one needs to go through and grow out of, but I’m not sure rewarding it with millions of investment dollars is a good idea.)
• On Software Quality - Nick Heer does a rundown of the Apple software bugs that are killing his respect for the company with a thousand tiny cuts. I would have a similar list if I could be arsed to maintain it. But he’s also right – we have higher expectations of Apple, and I’m wondering if maybe we should be disappointed when they fail the bar. They are, after all, just a computer company.
• An endless feed of celebrities eating chicken wings - Ryan follows up his “pre-deplatforming” post from last week.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Work continues on the firewood processor EP2 - (Cutting deck build) ‌(2:54:19)

Telly:

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - was quite good. Nothing revolutionary, but maybe that in itself is revolutionary. More of this sort of thing please.
• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Status:

Today’s paced pottering involved a trip to the allotment with my sister to fill up the compost bin. This used to be a 20 minute job of just throwing stuff in but I can’t do that now without exhausting myself so I spread it over a couple of hours while she got on with planting and stuff. It’s really hard to break the habit of just wanted to get on with it but I think I’m getting better at it.

That said, I’m feeling a little worn out this evening. Not too bad and it might just be the fresh air but things feel a bit raw in the old nervous system. Tomorrow will be the telling of it, I guess.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline - I’m going to have to listen to this again in the daytime because his voice is so soporific, which is a good thing for late night listening but not conducive to remembering anything.

Reading:

• How far back in time can you understand English? - A diary entry is written in increasingly older styles of English over a century, followed by an explanation of what’s going on.
• Why so many control rooms were Seafoam Green. - A look at the work of color theorist Faber Birren who figured out that certain colours were easy on the eye and improved mood and concentration. I feel like these shades of green were seen as old fashioned and have been eradicated in workplaces since the 80s. I wonder if that’s had any effect on the people who work there?
• What happens when a neighborhood is built around a farm. - Introducing the concept of “agrihoods”, essentially city farms that aim to feed the local population. Interesting concept but I’m very skeptical of the implementation here which feels bit like the “fliplanthropy” plot of The Curse. (See also the allotments link yesterday.)
• Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness? - Lots of noise about this topic over the last months, mostly around autism and ADHD. My take, for what it’s worth, is I had an autism diagnosis in 2018 which didn’t open any doors to support or treatment (so no “burden to the taxpayer” or whatever) but did improve my mental health just by giving me confirmation that I wasn’t stupid and gave me a framework for dealing with when I fucked up. Now I have a chronic fatigue diagnosis that does get me treatment (within the confines of a defunded NHS) my autism diagnosis has helped immeasurably to tailor that treatment in a way that will hopefully get me off benefits and back to work sooner. So yeah, more diagnoses please.
• State of the Operations - Warren Ellis (not the musician) is rethinking his newsletter, which is one of the inspirations for what I’m doing here so I’m paying attention. I think a lot of newsletter evolution can be drawn back to zines (of course I do) and I like this notion of a zine formatted for the inbox.
• The view from the mast-head - Erik Davis is still thinking about Moby Dick, this time in the context of revisiting “the classics” in a time of polycrisis.
• The realities of being a pop star. - Charli XCX has a blog and it’s quite good.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf (29:21)
• Lou Reed Meets the Press (1974) ‌(5:29)

Telly:

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Status:

Prescribed paced pottering continued today, although it does seem to boil down to “do one job but spread it out over the afternoon”. Today’s job was to clean my compostable waste boxes which had built up over the winter. It’s normally a job that takes 10 minutes after doing a compost run. I managed to make it last four hours. No ill effects so far.

Overnight listening:

• 1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline

Reading:

• Andor creator Tony Gilroy gives the interview he couldn’t during its release - Disney asked them not to mention fascism for fear of culture war bullshit overshadowing the launch, which is fair enough, and quite sensible if you want to get this stuff in front of people who maybe need to see it.
• Fight The Power: Chuck D on the politics of hip hop - an excerpt from his new book. “Beware when the government says it is in control of culture."
• Remembering Some Guys - “for every fully rationalized system that emerges, expect a corresponding increase in nonsense, horseplay, and mysticism”
• Cemented locks and deflated diggers: the war over privately run allotments - the row over Roots “Allotments” continues. I find it amusing that the march of private equity into the public realm is finding resistance from the humble allotmenteers. You don’t fuck with those people! But more seriously, what Roots and their investors are doing is bad on a fundamental, societal level and should be resisted. I hope this is an eye-opener for those affected and pushes them to resist it in other areas of public life. And they shouldn’t be called allotments unless they’re allotted by the council, managed by a committee of members and based within walking distance of their homes. Ooh, I clearly have an angry essay in me on this…

Telly:

• The Curling - there’s been a few matches in this Olympics where it could have gone either way, right down to the final stone. This men’s final was one of them. Phew! It’s been a fun fortnight but I’m glad I don’t “do” sports. Must be exhausting actually giving a shit all the time.

Status:

After waking at 5am from a typically weird dream (the house was being attacked by a dinosaur/crocodile which I scared off by waving my arms around, which woke up Fiona, though she doesn’t remember it) I slept well enough to try some prescribed pottering today. This is to figure out my baseline of activity with chronic fatigue that won’t trigger a crash. In essence, I do small things with plenty of breaks, making sure I’m not just on the sofa all day but not pushing myself too far.

The main activity was based around a couple of large sacks of flour which needed decanting, then making space to store them a shelf, then tidying up, a job that should take 10 minutes but which I spread over a couple of hours. I also shaved my head because it’s going to be warm for a few days so I shouldn’t get a chill. Along with cleaning out the rabbits that was my activity for the day. If there’s no notable crash tomorrow I’ll try that level again.

On going out to clean the rabbit run tonight I called out “housekeeping!” and I’m astonished I’ve never done that before in the 13+ years we’ve had rabbits.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: John Keats - I usually skip the poetry IOTs because poetry (no offence, poets) but sometimes the life of the poet is more interesting than their work (see Coleridge). This one, not so much. But it did help me get to sleep, which is supposed to be the point of listening with comfort headphones at 1am.

Reading:

• Cory Doctorow: Six Years of Pluralistic - Cory reflects on his massively productive blog, how and why he runs it and what effect it’s had on him. Cory often seems like a blogging superhero, doing an unimaginable amount of reading and writing that seems impossible to replicate, but he breaks it down nicely here and makes it feel doable as a practice. Lots to think about here with regard to what I’m doing with this site.
• Ah shit! We let pedophiles decide our beauty standards. - Jameela Jamil says what has been said many times before but still needs saying again and again. Society needs to stop making straight men feel weird for fancying grown-up women.
• An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia’s most famous painting - more interesting than the headline makes it sound, but also I’d struggle to write a headline for this as it goes all over the place, in a very good way.
• Ian Dunt: Can we extract the Reform nonsense from Labour? - on the proposed changes to achieving settled immigration status. I find this shit infuriating, but then I start with the truism that all people are equal and should be treated as such, not due to accidents of birth and ethnicity. More fool me.
• ‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows
• Research into hedgehog hibernation patters and how they’re being affected by climate change.

Watching:

• The Greek Mythology Family Tree, Explained ‌(14:40) - I know this stuff in bits and pieces from a myriad of comics, movies and stories, so it’s good to have it laid out like this.

Telly:

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Status:

Mostly curling today (it’ll all be over soon) but in-between I did find myself able to focus on some reading, so there’s a couple of nice links below. Mood is better and I feel ready to do some pottering. Sister informs me she has an excess of bokashi juice so we might inoculate some biochar this weekend.

While it’s always a good day to have a member of the royal household arrested it’s worth remembering it’s for being careless with secrets, not for being a sex offender. If you’re after a comparison, consider how Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because he wanted to marry a divorcee, not for being an antisemitic fascist.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: Solving The Mystery of The Collapse - the first couple of these were a bit messy but this one gets right into the meat of things with a wonderful guest, Eric Cline, who I’d love to hear more from. (His book 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed is on Libro.fm so I’ll probably get it next.)

Reading:

• Garbage Day: The only taboo left is copyright infringement - Thought-provoking musings from Ryan Broderick about the nature of “cool” in an environment where all online platforms are corporate-run. He posits that copyright is the only thing they care about so infringing that is the route to notoriety, which is an interesting throwback to the “illegal art” mashup scenes that brought us Negativeland and the Grey Album, because it gets you thrown off the mainstream platforms, which gets you talked about on said platforms. Or something. Like most stuff from Ryan I find it all a bit vertiginous but also fascinating.
• How hipsters gave us Trump - Of course Trump is a symptom of many things, but this is more interesting than you might imagine. As 50s hipsters stole their cultural cachet from black culture, millennial hipsters appropriated white working class motifs because they were (to reference the above) the last taboos in a progressive society, laying the path for MAGA transgressivity. Of specific interest to me is the citing of Jim Goad and Gavin McInnes, big names on the 90s zine scenes who are properly far-right figures. Goad in particular is a touchstone for transgressive work that excited liberals back in the day. Of course there were plenty of edgy weirdos making offensive work who didn’t turn out to be nazis - maybe I should start compiling them.
• How to raise children - I’ve never had to raise a child but I was raised and have done a bit of Uncle-ing in my time. This all rings true.
• Pay or okay - is it really? - A lot of sites are offering the choice between paying for a subscription or accepting tracking cookies. This is a deep dive into what that actually means and if it’s even a choice.

Scheduling:

• SUNN O))) are playing Birmingham, 2nd July at the Institute. I probably won’t go due to the usual fatigue bullshit but I’d love to be able to. I wonder if there’s seating…

Telly:

• The Curling

Status:

Still pretty grumpy today so riding it out by watching the curling, doing jigsaws and listening to calming music. I want to just get on and do stuff but am very aware that if I try in this state it’ll all just go wrong, so best to postpone the pottering for another day.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Mastery: Quantum Sound

Reading:

• Sentiers No. 390 - this used to be my favourite weekly newsletter but Patrick got a bit sidetracked by “AI” in the last year, filling it up with tedious nonsense. Which is fair enough but of no interest to me whatsoever. This week, however is like a blast from the past, full of stuff I want to click on and commentary I value. Long may it continue! And since I hadn’t managed to read much else today please consider it today’s collection of links.

Telly:

• The Curling - Golly! What a day! Also, the Japanese skip looks a heck of a lot like Yasuko Onuki and now I want to listen to Melt-Banana…
• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

This photo of my grandad was always on my mother’s desk. That’s her in the background (presumably with my uncle). I’d guess it was taken early 1950s, a few years before he died.

Status:

It’s the third anniversary of my mum’s death and to be honest I wasn’t expecting anything too adverse. I think about her often, of course, but the weird grief stuff seemed to have passed thanks to some therapy and the fact that a lot of dealing with chronic fatigue and autistic burnout involves “grief work”, so I should be at least ok at this stuff.

So I was a bit narked to find myself mildly grief stricken this morning. And yes, I’m annoyed about it. It seems to come from nowhere with no warning and, most criminally, serves no purpose. And then it goes away leaving me bemused and very aware that there’s another Pete having all the feelings and emotions in a secret part of my head that I have no access to but still have to suffer the consequences of.

It’s probably a good thing my therapy restarts in a few weeks. I know everyone grieves in their own way but I’m pretty sure being pissed off at having emotions and wishing they would just go away so I can get on with the important stuff, whatever that is, isn’t the best way to go about it.

Stupid feelings…

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: Did Homer Write History?

Reading:

• David Hume on Creativity - We should be grateful Hume is not alive today to write about AI.
• This is not an essay about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” - “Why am I supposed to give a fuck what an agonisingly posh woman from London thought Wuthering Heights was about when she was a teenager?" And it just gets better from there. The stuff about the “slippery nature of whiteness” is particularly interesting.

Watching:

• All Your Base is 25 years old - a high(ish)-def recreation of the original flash file.
• Practical Engineering: So You Want to Build a Tunnel… ‌(20:41)

Telly:

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• The Curling

If your rabbit is chewing something you’d rather they didn’t, don’t try and stop them. Simply bolt more wood on.

Status:

Rest day.

Music:

• Mastery: Quantum Sound - cropped up on Night Tracks a while back and the whole album is just out. Bit more info here as to the why’s and wherefore’s but overall it’s perfect brain calming music.

Reading:

• Is this the world’s most eye-popping restaurant? The architectural marvel – in a Leipzig industrial estate - Oscar Niemeyer’s final building. Took me a while to figure out what’s going on in the photo. If you pop Niemeyer Sphere into your image search engine of choice there’s some nice pics of the construction.
• ‘Unintentionally among the queerest releases of its time’: why Calamity Jane is my feelgood movie - one for the wife who loves this movie for reasons I cannot rationalise.
• How men are? The preposterously testosterone-fuelled Taxi Driver turns 50 - “Travis is hateful – as bile-filled as today’s far-right social media warriors… He’s a racist homophobe, a frustrated incel – one of the involuntarily celibate, who rage at the world. You’re reminded of the likes of Nick Fuentes, Charlie Kirk."

Telly:

• The Curling
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Nice bit of winter sun in-amongst the rain today.

Status:

Thought I’d avoided it but the crash eventually came this afternoon. Not the worst but definitely incapacitated so I spent the day watching curling and trying not to let my fight/flight response get agitated by nonsense.

Fuckall links today as I can’t really parse the feeds properly without getting a headache. Should be plenty tomorrow, and there’s always the archives.

Music:

• Happy To See Me by Big Cats - Fi sent me the track Bumbling Shithead Fascists by Guante and Big Cats (spotted on the t-shirt of a young person with interesting hair), which is very nice and on point, but quite different to this album by Big Cats on their own which I was enjoying last night.

Watching:

• Is time real? The physics behind the illusion of time ‌(6:26)
• Laura Kampf ‌(25:32)

Telly:

• Small Prophets - So, so good. A love letter to weird men with no more fucks to give.
• The Curling

The ceiling of Birmingham Town Hall after last night’s gig.

Status:

Rest day. Don’t feel too bad as last night wasn’t too stressful, but my body is definitely aware that I Did A Thing. Crash still might come tomorrow (post-exertion fatigue can take 48 hours to kick in, for some fucking reason) but Monday should be clear. And then I can return to my prescribed pottering.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Ten Benson’s early work, specifically the first two EPs and the debut album with highlights being The Claw and Robot Tourist bringing the feels. After that they went a little cringe but I’m curious to see what the recent stuff is like. Thanks to Sods for the reminder.

Reading:

• { feuilleton } is twenty - I like how John has stayed fairly consistent because he’s doing it for himself, not in service to some perceived audience or expectation. I wish I’d had that discipline, but it turned out my neurons diverge in a less conducive manner. Sidebar: I was actually thinking recently about when I met John at a 90s comic convention where, after stunning Jez and I with some new Lord Horror pages, he recommended a place around the corner for lunch that did whole roast chickens.
• Tracey Emin on reputation, radical honesty – and Reform - not a massive fan of her work (though thinking about it now there’s scope to say it’s in the field of the per-zine, which is in my field of interest) but boy she’s a force of nature and this is a fantastic interview.
• In a blind test, audiophiles couldn’t tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud.

Browsing:

• ZineLibrary.org - a collection of over a thousand anarchist zines, ready to print and collate for offline distribution. I’m tempted to run off a bunch of these for when Artefact (our local co-op art space) is back open. Via, and more info.

Watching:

• Lee Miller strokes a phallus ‌(0:48)

Telly:

• Small Prophets
• The Curling

…but unfortunately I have chronic fatigue so I can’t.

Status:

Just back from seeing Bridget Christie’s show at Birmingham Town Hall. My first trip to a gig in what must be years now. Took a fair bit of planning and judicious use of ear plugs (were stand-up gigs always this loud?) but we did it! I’m sure the next couple of days will be quite trying but I think it was worth it to take my wife out for her birthday. And of course Bridget was marvellous. If I do crash it’ll mostly be from laughing too much.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Code of Hammurabi

Reading:

• The Banality Machine - another good “AI” takedown for the files.
• How “hedgehog tanks” are forcing Russia and Ukraine to rewrite drone warfare - I don’t like war-tech stuff because it can become a bit pornographic, but there’s something about the workshops and iterations here that interests me. While I’m sure soldiers always adapted their kit on the fly this feels on another level.
• How one hidden-away decision defines the future of the Starmer government - Ian Dunt explains what a cabinet secretary is and why they’ve become less effective of late.
• Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why - I have vivid moments throughout my adult life when I learned things that clearly should have been part of my state education. Often they were in disciplines that had been denigrated as “Mickey Mouse” or not relevant to the job market. Media studies was the big one as it seemed to decode all manner of controlling bullshit so of course the Murdochs were against it, but of course gender and race studies are also a threat and so must be shut down.
• Richard Littler watches Forbidden Planet (1956) and notices all manner of things that later appeared in Star Wars and other movies.
• We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps - Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis making sensible points.

Watching:

• Kermode reviews “Wuthering Heights” ‌(13:15) - I think the most interesting thing about Emerald Fennell career is she’s essentially a B-movie shlock director but for whatever reason gets held up as proper art-house making serious deep work. I’m sure this will be an enjoyable nonsense, and I’m happy for everyone involved, but I’m not expecting much more.

Telly:

• The Curling - After moaning about the unskippable ads on Discovery+ I’m happy to say I’ve been watching on my laptop rather than the tellybox and have seen no adverts over two matches today. (The lead commentator remains a 4th rate Ken Bruce clone but he’s not much worse than Steve Cram to be fair.)

Status:

A rest day in prep for the theatre tomorrow. Finally accepted I want to watch more curling than the BBC are able to show and paid £3.99 for full coverage on Discovery+. Was then disappointed to discover this includes unskippable adverts but it did seem too good to be true. I’ve pretty much eliminated my exposure to advertising so it’s a bit of a shock to have this attention seeking bullshit parachute into my carefully constructed context. Still it’s only for a week and Fi can watch as much exciting stuff as she wants now.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Bronze Age Apocalypse: The Fall of Troy

Reading:

• Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong
• The quirky geology behind Olympic curling stones
• ‘People like cheap energy’: the bagel shop saving money and emissions with plug-in batteries - I’m intrigued by plug-in batteries but whenever a YouTuber I follow has a sponsored slot for them they’re around a couple of grand, so not great for home use. Could see this working for the bakery though.

Telly:

• Small Prophets
• The Curling

Still failing to photograph this brick. What is this shit?

Status:

Rest day today. Had a headache for most of it and napped late-afternoon. Probably over did the pottering a bit yesterday, so that’s a data point: potter slightly less.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Jeffrey Epstein was a paedophile, and we all live in his world - a must read from Carole Cadwalladr, reflecting on when she was sent to do travel writing from St Tropez 20 years ago and got talking to renowned photographer of naked children David Hamilton who knew all the right people. The crimes of the rich and powerful are always happening in plain sight.
• Alistair Carns: Labour’s ex-marine who ‘would be a nightmare’ for the Tories - Utterly bemused by these stories about my MP, presumably being planted in the press. Nobody knows what he believes in or where he sits on the political spectrum and he seems to spend half his time “adventuring” up mountains and in the arctic. Can only assume he’s being primed as the sacrificial starting gun for a leadership challenge.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Building a firewood processing line from scraps - EP1 (Log & Roller Deck build) ‌(1:54:35)

Telly:

• Small Prophets
• The Curling

Something about photographing this brick has stretched my stupid phone past it limits - this is not how I wanted the photo to turn out. Need to get the Nikon out there.

Status:

Paced pottering continues. I wanted to tidy up the middle room today and managed to get it to an adequate state by doing a little bit at a time. Even got the vacuum out for a rug, though I felt it afterwards so might not do that again. A double victory as I’m very aware the bulk of the housework falls on Fiona these days so if I can do a bit more than before it’s a massive help.

Overnight listening:

• Empire: The Bronze Age Apocalypse ep 1 - I seem to have developed a soft spot for pre-Iron Age history, probably thanks to that massive Dave Graeber book, so this was fun. Everything you think is unique to “western civilisation” was already done 3000+ years ago. (Also, cool note about the Near East (western Med) being supplied by Cornish tin).

Reading:

• Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends: Who’s that baby? - It’s long been said that the internet is a mirror. It follows these “AI” nonsenses are also a mirror, maybe a hall of them.
• Anora’s American Dream - I like the bit where the audience was happily laughing along and then suddenly fall silent. I found Anora to be a very discomforting watch, totally worth five stars.
• “Flying” electric boats could remake urban transport 🪜 - Hydrofoils are back, baby!
• Out of the red, but at what cost? Birmingham council asset sales have left city reeling, say residents - No longer financially bankrupt (if it ever really was) but still morally bankrupt. The mismanagement of my city over the last couple of decades has been a neoliberal disaster.

Watching:

• What if you made a jetpack using rifles? ‌(4:37)

Telly:

• The Curling
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• The Residence - Excellent and highly recommended. I love how they started with a non-fiction book about how the White House works behind the scenes and built a proper whodunnit on top. Uzo Aduba is a revelation and my new favourite kooky detective. Naturally, Netflix have cancelled it.

Status:

Experimenting with what I guess we’re calling paced pottering, doing little things for short periods of time and taking plenty of breaks. I may have over-pottered a couple of times today but mostly it’s been OK and I’ve ticked off a couple of things I wanted to get done.

The main goal for this week is to make it to the Town Hall on Friday to see Bridget Christie for Fi’s birthday. No boom-bust, no burn-out, no crashes allowed before then.

Overnight listening:

• Agartha by Wata Igarashi

Reading:

• Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30 - never read it, probably never will, but I like that it exists and enjoy reading about it.
• Martin Rowson: I asked AI to name my wife. To the hopelessly incorrect people it cited, my deepest apologies - one of the most infuriating things about modern online information services is their inability to say they don’t have the answer.
• We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher - Mark “Capitalist Realism” Fisher is, of course, really interesting and one of the big thinkers of our era (for better or worse) so I’m intrigued by a film about him. But the milieu, if you like, that Fisher and people who like Fisher swim in has a tendency to be front-loaded with theory and jargon (for better or worse) so I’m also very wary of a film about him. Especially one which proudly claims to have been made on Instagram, whatever the fuck that means. Expecting this to be a love-hate watch.
• This whistle fights fascists

Looking:

• Travis Chapman’s art, specifically Hippo, fart, milk battle, crème brûlée harvest capybara raccoon cows
• The Summoning of Bertrand Russell

Watching:

• Noah Kalina ‌(17:37)
• Woodturning - 1826 Antique Bowling Ball ‌(17:35)

Telly:

• The Curling
• The Residence

Status:

Rough sleep last night and a bit grumpy today. Can’t settle or focus. Feeling like this is the crash from Friday so hopefully it’ll blow itself out.

Wally decided today would be a good day to develop a gut issue and stop eating. We don’t like to panic as it sometimes resolves itself but by mid afternoon he was still off and clearly in some discomfort so it was syringe time. A spot of metacam for the pain, half a teeny tablet of motility medication to get things moving and a bunch of recovery food (powered grass diluted into mush basically) to push things along. Within a few hours he was back to normal.

I sometimes wonder, after doing all this, if the rabbit might have recovered anyway. It’s not worth the risk, of course, especially on a Sunday when the vets are closed (which is when they always decide to shut down). Worst case scenario we just wasted some meds.

I refer to this as kick-starting the rabbit.

Overnight listening:

• If Books Could Kill - The Millionaire Next Door - arguably the origin of the belief that super-rich people have earned the right to be super-rich

Reading:

• Jeff Bezos, Moral Cretin - notable for the concept of team billionaire. “Team Billionaire thinks that billionaires are brilliant, wise, and omnicompetent.. thinks the public needs to stay in line and respect their betters… thinks the government should stay on the sidelines (at least until its bailout time, that is).”
• You can just dig a hole: Some thoughts on trench composting and effort. - I’ve never given trench composting much thought because, well, who has that much space? And also, so much digging! But I hadn’t really considered that they can be reused and can get more efficient over time as the soil ecology gets used to the inputs. More research needed.

Watching:

• 160 year old Victorian door frames restoration ‌(34:18)
• Laura Kampf (27:11)

Telly:

• The Curling
• The Residence

Nope, not going out in that weather mate.

Status:

Bit of a rest day today. Weather still shite but there’s curling on the tellybox.

The ash10.com domain is expiring soon and I’m in two minds as to renewing it. It’s not in use for anything but I have a soft spot for it. Clearly it’s a play on my surname but it also has some rather nerdy history.

About 25 years ago the assistant editor job was advertised at the weekly comic 2000AD. Some friends suggested I go for it so, despite having no experience in publishing outside of zines, I applied. To my surprise I got an interview though they did immediately say it was because mine was the weirdest application. Obviously I didn’t get the job and went on with my life.

But there’s a tradition at 2000AD that the editorial staff are robots with their real names turned into alphanumeric codes - Alan Grant became AALN-1, for example. So in the unlikely event that I got this job I was going to need a robot name. ASH-10 it was.

And so, as was the fashion, I looked up ASH10 as a domain name and saw it was available. Five letters on a dot-com was pretty rare so I snapped it up. The thing is I’ve never found an actual use for it. It’s not like I don’t have a history of impulse-buying domains – who in my world doesn’t? But this one feels wrong to let go. Surely I can make use of my robot alter-ego for something?

I have until April to decide.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads as gangsta rap album
• Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters - the Guardian finally notices what has been blindingly obvious for years now.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Pouring the pad and making a ramp - work shop build EP2 ‌(2:08:50)
• You Could Call it a Scene: A slice of West Midlands alternative music in 2015 ‌(1:28:31) - funny, if this was made just a few years earlier I’d probably know everyone, but I know none of these people or bands - my eye was elsewhere. I wonder if someone’s recording whatever’s going on right now?
• Torbjörn Åhman Blacksmithing - Making a sleigh bell ‌(19:35) - my favourite thing about Torbjörn’s videos is how he spends the first half making the tools before making the thing. I always forget this and am scratching my head as to what the hell he’s doing.

Telly:

• The Curling