Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Status:

The big crash came last night, though it mostly subsided by this afternoon. I’m reluctant to assign a cause: could have been Sunday’s allotmenteering, could have been the psychotherapy. Could even have been the rejection I got from the art thing I applied for.

That was a funny one as I really wasn’t expecting to get it and had only really applied to get some practice at interacting with the world again. If I’m honest I was relieved when I was turned down. But it definitely hit me in a way I wasn’t happy with. Perhaps it dragged up a bunch of feelings from when I burned out on being an artist, prior to my autism diagnosis. I had this sense that I just didn’t know what anyone wanted from me or how I should be interacting with this opaque world. To be fair that’s not exclusive to the art world — I’ve had that all my life, and in many ways it led me to developing an art practice — but it was the last sphere to explicitly make me feel like that.

It reminded me that, pre-pandemic, I was working on building up less institutional, more collaborative spaces for art practice with the community I’d found in Stirchley, but that all got kiboshed. So this was a good motivation to go back to focussing on that rather than trying to get back into spaces where, no matter how welcoming they actually are (and to be absolutely, the vast majority of people I know in the Birmingham arts scenes are lovely and I hold no grudges, only gratitude), I’m never going to really feel like I fit in.

In other news, I had another interaction with Luna, the grumpy wonky-eye’d cat who sniffed my fingers and let me rub her head for 3 seconds before hissing at me like a snake. I consider this progress.

Reading:

• The EHRC trans code explained — Ian Dunt ran it past some lawyery types and has produced a surprising cogent summary of a very incoherent text. The broad conclusion is it can’t work in practical terms and will doubtless be challenged in the European court, forcing the government’s hand. I keep coming back to the Supreme Court judgement effectively saying the law didn’t work as intended, which means it should go back to lawmakers to draft a better law, not be fudged by an unelected commission into advice that satisfies no-one.
  • Amnesty International exposed years of anti-trans reporting at four UK newspapers. They ignored it. — I think the Guardian has gotten better over the last year or so, especially once the rabidly anti-trans editorial team at the Observer were sold off, and maybe they’re realised they’re keeping bad company. But we’ll never know because there’s been no confirmation of an editorial position on this, which is pretty unusual for a campaigning newspaper. As for the far-right rags, no surprises there.
• Cross purposes: how the England flag got caught in a tug-of-war between rightwing nationalists and football fans — I’d been wondering how reticent “normal” people would be about flying the England flag for the World Cup since its vigorous co-option by fascists. One of the houses on our street has a giant flag in the window and, like the author of this piece, it did cause me to do an “uh-oh” double take before I clocked it’s football time. Until recently I was pretty indifferent to the flag but since we were terrorised it’s definitely triggering all the bad connotations now.
• Heatwave hacking — A list of ways to cool a house during a hot spell. Will probably need some of these next week.

Watching:

• Simone Giertz ‌(12:31)
• What if everything was antimatter EXCEPT Earth? ‌(2:54)
• Moviedrome: Welcome to the cult ‌(48:09) — The documentary that screened last year is on YouTube now. I don’t know how this would play to people who weren’t there in the 80/90s but it was nice to revisit that feeling of discovering weird art on late night telly. The format is very much of its time and I don’t think we need this on the BBC now, but there’s always space for a similar style of curation and explanation, the older sibling or cousin introducing you to the film or record or comic that will change your life. For the record my personal “perfect Moviedrome” film was Knightriders, an utterly ridiculous but incredibly heartfelt movie which introduced me to the genius of Ed Harris.
  • Alex Cox and Nick Freand Jones Q&A ‌(59:11) — Recorded during the BFI’s Moviedrome season in 2025.

Exploring

• Bubbles.town — An old-school aggregator taking feeds from indie-web blogs (like the one you’re reading!) and throwing them into a Hacker News / Reddit voting platform tied to the fediverse. Bit of a firehose, of course, but could be good for serendipity. I’ve subscribed to a couple of the RSS feeds and will dip in should my regular reads feel stale. There’s also a daily and weekly digest, which looks like a manageable snapshot. It’s the sort of place you might only find one good blog but it’ll stick with you for years. (via LMG who I probably found on something like this in 2001 or whatever.)

Status:

Psychotherapy today (I used to just call it “therapy” but now I’m having regular occupational therapy it’s getting a bit confusing as to which therapy I’m referring to) which went well and left me feeling good, though it may have opened up some doors I wasn’t aware of as I was a bit off late-afternoon. Nothing too bad, I hope. Found my head spinning with opinions on important things which I can’t really do anything about, which is usually a sign that my brain is a bit sprained and needs to rest. So rest it shall.

Reading:

• How the heck do solar panels work? — How indeed does a thin sheet of silicon turn sunshine into electricity? I never really knew, until now. This is a nicely written explainer in simple language, with options to dive deeper into the science if you’re up for it. More of this kind of thing please!
• A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis — Whale falls are when a whale dies and its carcass rests on the bottom of the deep sea, bringing a disproportionate amount of nutrients to a small patch of ocean floor. “Five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans” have been found in the Diamantina Fracture Zone between the Australian and Antarctic continents and scientists are very excited about this.
  • Not at all related in any way, the trailer for Whale Fall, which is not about whale falls but is about a man who is swallowed by a sperm whale and has an hour to get out. Missed opportunity there.
• Eleven Guardian readers on the weirdest things their dogs have ever eaten — This is as great as you might imagine. Maybe even greater. (And don’t worry, all dogs survived.)
• Garbage Day went to that cage fighting thing at the White House — “Is this the best we can do? Is this what we are?"
• The SpaceX IPO is a giant unworkable con orchestrated by an overt white supremacist huckster — Long, with much detail about Musk’s nonsense that all our pensions are now tied to, but has some gloriously furious writing. “Last week’s SpaceX IPO is a stunning act of financial fraud that […] cobbles together a bunch of money-losing ventures into a giant pump-and-dump scheme untethered to objective reality, all controlled by a proven bullshitter."
• Heading in the wrong direction — Someone I hadn’t heard of before critiqued some of the common objections to the UK’s social media ban proposal and they were a bit wrong, so Phil Gifford’s had a go, Phil being someone who, like me, has been around long enough to see this shit evolve. I’m particularly drawn to “Then maybe social media should not exist in its current form, for anyone?" What people are worried about is fundamentally different to the social media of 10 or 20 years ago, and that in turn was a radical shift from what existed before. There’s nothing sacred about the current offer from the tech oligarchs and anyone with long-term experience of these things could tell you that. Aw shit, I’m going to have to write something longer about this, aren’t I…

Watching:

• Practical Engineering: How to demolish a bridge ‌(17:55) — The look in Grady’s eyes when he mentions explosives is a little disconcerting.

Listening:

• Dream Time: Shoegaze Sounds — Featuring actual shoegaze, stuff that sounds like shoegaze and a guy who’s written a book about shoegaze talking about shoegaze. Rather good late night listening.
  • Big discovery from this show was A.R. Kane, a black shoegaze band I’d never heard of before (they peaked before I became aware of proper music) who are really really good. Reckon I’ll be working through their back catalogue tonight.

Music:

• Setting by Setting — My algo-channel on Apple Music has been pretty milquetoast of late with me skipping a lot of stuff I didn’t recognise, but this popped up yesterday and I really enjoyed it.

Bindweed is a nightmare, but the flowers are really nice…

Status:

Rest day, but once the usual morning stress-dream trauma passed I was determined not to stay idle so have lightly pottered around the kitchen and garden. No crash after yesterday’s exertions but there’s still time on the old PEM countdown.

Reading:

• Life, Love, Liberty: The spirit of Marjane Satrapi — The comprehensive obituary from The Comics Journal that I’ve been waiting for. Highly recommended reading for all artists.
• Phil Gyford w/e 2026-06-14 — If I did these things weekly instead of daily they might look a bit like this.
• The bands who got left behind when punk exploded — Alexis Petridis looks at the NME in the year the Sex Pistols “changed British rock forever” and finds it doesn’t quite match the mythology.
  • Sidebar: I was amused at Petridis' confusion over the term “punk” being used to describe “harmless pop-rock bands” who were nothing like we’d now imagine punk to be. Clearly he doesn’t know the full etymology of the term which, prior to 1976, would have likely meant a youngish homosexual man, analogous to a “twink” in our parlance. Given the aesthetics of punk, at least as promulgated by McClaren and Westwood, was queer as fuck the co-option of the term shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
• Lessons from Slime — This brief look at slime, and sliminess across science and nature, reminded me of when, the other day, after removing a particularly large slug from the hedgehog cafe, I was amazed at how its slime did not want to wash off my fingers. Eventually I had to transfer it to a flannel. Astonishing stuff.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf ‌(14:25)

Listening:

• The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke — Am enjoying this audiobook which is less a history of politics and ideas and more biographical sketches of weirdos who got led astray. Here’s a nice interview with the author. “The book is about individuals, and what brings a person to use (often lethal) violence, their motivations and the circumstances that might direct them towards that kind of activity, and the personal consequences, positive and negative, that follow." I’m hoping it also sheds some light on why Palestine is such a magnet for western leftists, often to the exclusion of other causes. via

Pre-ordering:

• Networks of New York, 2026 edition — Ingrid Burrington is re-issuing her 2016 guide which I really enjoyed and attempted to replicate on the streets of Birmingham a couple of times. Looking forward to this!

Music:

• Joy by Means of Production — When writing above about the etymology of “punk” I remembered I was told this by my old friend Jeremy Dennis/Day back in her cartoonist days when I sold her mini comics, and that she’s now in a post-punky electronica band making music I quite like, so I stuck their album on. Should also be on your streamers.

We planted this apple tree on the allotment in memory of my mum a few years ago. It’s established itself very well.

Status:

Relatively full day today, though I tried to manage it to prevent a crash. I think I did OK? Will find out tomorrow I guess.

First had a visit from a friend who I hadn’t seen for a long time. They’ve also got CFS symptoms though haven’t gone through the diagnosis process yet. It was nice to be able to suggest things that have worked for me, hoping they can head it off at the pass, as it were — I’m pretty sure if I’d had an intervention earlier instead of being stuck on a waiting list I wouldn’t have gotten quite so disabled. It also occurred to me that explaining to others is how I deepen my knowledge, so helping them understand the CFS management techniques will also help me. Could be a win-win.

Then we went to the allotment for a compostables drop-off. Fi offered to help me fill the compost bay but I decided to do it on my own. Getting help is important, and I’m grateful for it, but I need to learn how to do things at my new slower pace. If I’m working with someone else it’s hard not to match their pace, and getting someone to do a thing the way I want to do it can sometimes be more tiring than doing it myself. So Fi went and weeded her vegetable beds while I spent two hours slowly and gently loading the compost heap, a job that used to take me 15 minutes, if that. Plenty of breaks, lots of water, and a couple of chats with passing folk I hadn’t seen for a while. Lovely.

Reading:

• Step inside Belle & Sebastian’s visual universe — I always like seeing the contact sheets for iconic photos. via
• ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion — Ooh, I feel like I could write a lot about this, from the very concept of ‘taste’ and how it’s formed to the idea than the ‘algorithm’ is fundamentally any different to previous systems of optimisation. Then throw in a critique of the cult of individualism under capitalism (century of the self and all that) and the awareness that no matter how nuanced and refined you are about, say, music, you can be pretty vanilla about, say, food, and some people take food very seriously. Fun times.

Watching:

• Dining table with chopped legs restoration ‌(31:35)

Listening:

• Alan Partridge’s Summer of Sport ‌(3:45)

Bookmarking:

• HTML for people — “I don’t think websites were ever intended to be made only by “web professionals.” Websites are documents at heart. Just about everyone knows how to make a document in this digital age, be it Word, Google Docs, Markdown, or something else. HTML shouldn’t be an exception."

Status:

Rest day after yesterday’s occupational therapy which is always followed by a bit of a comedown. An hour of sustained concentration and conversation takes a lot out of me. So I’ve spent most of today in the garden, reading in the hammock and pottering in the shed.

Great-nephew M came over for a bit to hang out. His request, which was nice. Fi had come back from some art thing in Balsall Heath (she’s such a fucking artist these days) with a copy of Bed Zine, a collection of “art and writing by chronically ill, neurodivergent & disabled artists” which she showed him, because it’s always good to expose him to different stuff, and he spent a good half hour reading it, which was great! And then we slowly realised that, while Fi had flicked through it, we didn’t know whether it was totally suitable for a nearly 10 year old. But this is what uncles and aunts are for, right? Of course when we asked him what he thought of it he said most of it was interesting and when there were things he didn’t understand he just skipped over them, which is how it works.

The main thing though was him reading it from cover to cover and not looking at his screen once. And then he sat and looked at the trees while listening to his music. There’s hope for these kids yet.

Hogwatching:

• Hedgehog Cam 6-9 June 2026 — For some reason my wildlife camera stopped recording for the start of June but I got it working again.
• Hedgehog Rolling — An 11 second excerpt from the above showing some weird and fascinating behaviour!

Reading:

• ‘Why would you put a toxic product into the hands of a young child?’: director turned activist Beeban Kidron on why big tech needs its tobacco moment — I empathise hugely with online safety campaigners like this. Unlike the censorious puritans of my age, Mary Whitehouse et al, they are not defending a moral status quo by punching down at minorities and they have genuinely important and vital concerns. I do think the tobacco analogy is apt, and I think this is a bigger issue than children. We’re probably in a mental health crisis across the whole population right now thanks to unfettered addictive corporate media, something that has been growing for decades before exploding in recent years. I mean, have you seen Facebook? It’s not kids on there. What to do about it? I’m not going to try to answer but none of the technical solutions seem sensible or effective — in order to check a child’s age you need to check everyone’s age, and that can fuck right off as it plays right into the surveillance capitalists hands. Something more fundamental is needed, targeting the rights of the companies themselves to exploit their audiences rather than the rights of adults to do internets on their own terms. Anyhoo, interesting interview.
• Mother Fucker 🪜 — Emily Ratajkowski: ‌After becoming a single mom, I began compulsively dating in order to figure out what kind of woman I wanted to be. As so often with Ratajkowski’s writing I wonder how much of this is a rare view into “hot people problems” and how much can be universalised to the rest of us. Still, if people who look like her are going to be fetishised and idealised by mainstream society it’s probably healthy to have them humanised a bit too.
• The barnacle problem waiting behind Hormuz — Fascinating report about “biofouling” of cargo ships which reduces reduces their fuel efficiency and handling, something that happens naturally but is being accelerated on ships stuck in the Straight of Hormuz where “a harsh combination of high water temperature, high salinity, and prolonged stagnation […] can quickly turn a microscopic slime layer into algae, barnacles, tubeworms, and heavy calcareous growth." The longer they’re stuck there, the worse it gets.

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Installing my DIY grapple on the Volvo L120 and testing it ‌(3:04:39)

Listening:

• The Miles Davis Story 4. Burning Down the House

Browsing:

• Birmingham Resistance Library — I’ve been linking to various online and offline zine and anarchist libraries and today discovered there’s one in my own city! No idea who’s running it or how long it’s been going on for but I like the mission statement and look forward to visiting sometime. Might even donate some stuff that would otherwise get lost in a charity shop.

Downloading:

• Snub TV — Apparently the YouTube uploads (of this music show that opened the ears of teens like me) were butchered by copyright strikes. These uncensored versions are on Archive.org. thx Stx.

Status:

Had my monthly session with the NHS occupational therapist for my chronic fatigue today. This was the sixth session and we’re definitely over the hump of what I need to be doing and into the fields of how I’m getting on with doing it. Short report is things are going well. While there have been crashes and slumps I’ve anticipated them and managed them, and I’ve had extended periods of paced pottering which have not resulted in bad crashes, which is good. The next stage, which will take a while to get right, is to get out in the world and apply these learnings to less controllable environments. I noted that I haven’t been out on my mobility scooter for over a month because I haven’t wanted/needed to go anywhere, and this is not great as it’s shutting me off from the world. So my next goal is to go for a coffee with someone who isn’t Fi and survive the experience. I reckon somewhere with a garden could work to begin with. In time I’d like to be able to safely hang out somewhere where I might bump into friends.

In other news, Lav had an eating pause this morning but got over it before needing to be force fed, so that’s a relief. I’m going to pretend my massaging her stomach is what did it, but to be honest who knows. Main thing is she’s fine.

When I posted last night about the bilge pump I hadn’t had a chance to test it emptying the bath, so I’m delighted to say it worked wonders. Almost too well, in fact, so I think I need to put the power supply on a lower setting lest it burn out. This summer the rabbits will have fresh grass on their lawn!

Reading:

• RIP David Hockney — I owe him so much on a personal level for his work on camera obscuras and photo joiners which totally changed how I saw art and photography.
• AI Economics for Dummies — You know that saying that parody is just the truth sharpened to a point?
• Why Olivia Rodrigo’s love of The Cure is pop’s greatest medicine — And also Robert Smith’s love of Rodrigo, as he doesn’t suffer fools. This reminded me that I do like one of her songs - Bad Idea Right is what I believe the kids call a banger. (They probably don’t.)
• Swirling into chaos: No.10’s inertia threatens national security — Ian Dunt on internal and external threats to the UK. I admit to being a bit dismissive of Al Carns resigning over defence spending, but only because I was a bit focussed on the racist rioting in Belfast. But of course the collapse of NATO does mean we need a proper overhaul of defence because the bad is both coming from inside and outside, often from the same people. A war on two fronts. Yay. Fun. (Al Carns is still behaving like a dick, mind you.)

Watching:

• Primitive Technology: Building walls with fired bricks and mud mortar ‌(12:45) — It occurred to me that beyond watching one guy try to recreate stone-age methods of construction, which I find endlessly fascinating (and also a good example of how humans are communal creatures — it takes him ages on his own), this might also appeal to people who want to watch someone who looks like a hench Michael Socha walk around with his shirt off.

Listening:

• The Online Marketplace of Ideas — When I linked to this under Reading the other day I didn’t clock that there’s also a separate podcast discussion about the exhibition between the Joshua Citarella and his collaborators. LOTS of academic art/theory speak — I often wonder what it would be like to be someone who has the confidence to converse like this so easily — but not so much as to overwhelm. Though I did zone out a couple of times and imagine their voices as coming from muppets, which was fun.
  • Further exploration of Do Not Research and New Models feels warranted.

Music:

• Another One Bites the Bee Gees — I’m a sucker for an old-school mashup.

After yesterday’s Wally photo went down well, here’s another one of him exploring under my bench in the shed as I work above.

Status:

Pottering again, and while tidying the shed I came across the little bilge pump I’d bought some summers back with the intention of pumping bath water onto the lawn (which is annoyingly a few degrees uphill from the house) during a heatwave. I never got it to work, because CFS, but thought I’d give it a go with my new pacing skills. The trick was getting a 12v power supply with enough juice but then I found a car battery charger Fi had bought years ago hiding at the back of a shelf and it worked gangbusters.

Now I just needed to wire it all up, which meant getting the soldering iron out, something I haven’t done for a few years. After a couple of hours I had something that worked, so I retired to the sofa and promptly fell asleep for the rest of the day. Focusing is tiring!

Fi’s in the bath right now. I’m hoping she remembers not to empty it.

Reading:

• Jules went on a tour of a waste incineration site and took loads of photos — I actually drove past this on the way back from Devon once. It’s an amazing looking building, like an extended sandcrawler, and of course I’m utterly fascinated by waste management so seeing inside was a joy.
• My queasy, forest-scented stroll through LA’s new AI art museum — Refik Anadol was one of the data artists I was keeping tabs on in the 2010s when the AI / machine learning stuff was in its infancy and had potential to be interesting. His work was OK, I guess? Not much more than a tech demo but then pretty much everything was back then. Sorry to say he doesn’t appear to have developed it much and this “museum” is a pretty farcical piece of artwashing for big tech that I’m pleased to see appears to have misjudged the public’s appetite for this sort of shit.

Sighing:

• My MP issued a hit-video on my newly elected councillor yesterday, so that was fun. Of all the Birmingham people whose spark to get into politics was Gaza he’s probably the most moderate and harmless, so he’s a weird target. I guess the “think of the children!” angle was too good to pass up. The MP has been pretty quiet as to his actual beliefs since being parachuted in to a safe seat at the last election, spending a disconcerting amount of time climbing mountains and walking to the North Pole, but it seems the mask is finally off. Ah well.
• And then this evening he’s resigned from the government (he was a junior defence minister or something) because of defence spending, something which hasn’t exactly been high on the agenda unless I missed a memo? This comes as racist pogroms are taking place in Northern Ireland. Nice to see where his priorities are.
• My instinct is he’s looked at the spread of votes in the council elections across his constituency and figured it’s between Reform and Green, so he’s dialling up the hard-man bullshit and going Reform. He can fuck off then.

Watching:

• Simone Giertz asks Hank Green anything ‌(1:08:02) — I am very aware that I have a parasocial relationship with Simone Giertz and I think that’s OK as long as you’re very aware of it and don’t make it weird or anything. She brings me smiles.

Status:

Was determined to resume pottering today, a medically prescribed activity which keeps me moving in a non-fatiguing way. In other words, get off the fucking sofa. The best pottering activity I’ve found is tidying up, so I’ve been working along the bench in the shed, putting things away and sorting through those plastic boxes of random bits that just accumulate over time.

Wally was doing that slightly needy thing he does sometimes, hanging around near me and looking a bit sad. He’s not actually sad. His breeding just makes him look like an insecure 2000’s era San-X character. I think he might be a bit needy though, poor little boo.

Reading:

• The Online Marketplace of Ideas — I love this exhibition, made up of merchandise and books sold by online influences and thought leaders, or whatever we’re calling them these days, from blatant grifters to considered academics.
  • “Merch is where the immaterial experience of web 2 culture touches down into our lived human space. It is the physical precipitant of “the digital” into our material world. As an analogue display technology, it works to signal identity in social contexts where the screen cannot reach."
  • It looks like an old fashioned boutique store, but it represents a virtual world, and that intersection of two worlds which have radically changed in the last couple of decades is particularly fascinating.
  • ‌"Within the exhibition, this wide gamut of political positions is contrasted against an underlying uniformity of material supply chains. While recent commentary has focused on the controversial opinions of online personalities, it has often overlooked the platform’s reorganization of work and materials in the world."
• John Harris: Cars burn in Belfast, bricks fly in Southampton – and the ubiquitous cry of ‘civil war’ goes up again — ‌For lots of people, mundane daily reality now carries a lot less weight than what they see hundreds of times a day on the small screen they carry in their pocket. And if you are partial to a vision of a Britain constantly on the verge of violent crisis, your algorithmically curated video feeds will deliver exactly that kind of stuff – fighting, riots, angry altercations on public transport – and foster the sense that you are living in a dystopian drama, for which Farage constantly provides the ugly narration.
• It was Britain’s most expensive house. Why is its only resident a homeless man who lives on the porch? — An article in two parts. First the ongoing obscenity of empty mansions during a housing crisis. Secondly the interview with the homeless guy who of course has a fascinating story.
• ‘It’s not about heroes and villains’: the triumphant return of I Shot Andy Warhol — Such a good film. I remember seeing it with a friend who subsequently photocopied the entire SCUM Manifesto and pasted it up in her living room.
  • Barely related to this, other than for former wrote an essay included in SCUM, today I learned Paul Krassner and Paul Karasik are different people.
• German ruling declares Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words and makes it liable for false answers
• I am a horse and I would like to try cake

Watching:

• Ants Pants: Removing rotten and leaning trees ‌(2:27:40) — When I was thinking about what I do on my computer and whether it’s healthy or not, I did reflect that I spend a lot of time watching this Estonian man cut down trees on his farm, so it’s not all algo-doom.

Listening:

• Origin Story: Evangelicals pt 2 — Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, oh my! Some batshit stuff here, as expected. I appreciated a focus on “the electric church” of televangelism as a technological shift with social consequences, which I think could be applied to what’s happening with algorithmic social media today.

Status:

Therapy day today, and it’s going well, I think. Talked about my mood on Sunday and whether I’m doomscrolling or not. I’m pretty sure I’m managing my screen time well, but then I’m sure everyone thinks that. Might be worth getting some data on what my inputs really are. I do find it fascinating to see how other people use their computers. It is too gauche to assume mine might be of interest?

Also had a visit from a friend with a dog, which is always a joy.

Reading:

• As censorship expands, autonomous libraries are springing up to fill the gaps — A brief look at leftist/anarchist community libraries in the US which I found really interesting. Mentioned Tamarack Free Library which I think could be good model for Stirchley, so keeping tabs on that. Also like the look of the Free Society People’s Library. (Our local library is great but it’s constantly under threat so can’t be relied upon long term.)
• The World Cup reimagined as Gianni Infantino’s West Side Story — I normally skip David Squires' cartoons because I have no fucking idea what he’s on about, but this is quite genius.

Status:

Mood somewhat improved on yesterday but still a bit gloomy or whatever. Tidying the shed a bit helped, though I hope I didn’t overdo it.

Had a nice neighbour interaction when someone posted on the street group that an elderly neighbour needed a “Samsung charger” because she’d left hers on a train. Since I knew this was just a USB cable, and I’m the kind of person who has a big box of USB cables and plugs, I told them to come over. Of course they thought they were stupid for not knowing what cable they needed and I made sure to say they’re not stupid. It’s the tech companies' fault for making them feel stupid.

Funnily enough I have zero experience with Android phones and I had trouble telling if it was charging off a 10w plug or not, because it didn’t flash up a big battery like the iPhone does. I did some testing with the laptop charger, which it loved, and deduced that the 10w was working, just slowly, which is fine for their needs.

And hey, let the record show my box of USB cables and plugs came in handy tonight. Never diss the box of cables. (No-one’s needed the FireWire ones for a while though.)

Reading:

• It’s 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it’s just like Word and it’s very easy. — The specifics might differ (I started with an HTML 3.2 book) but this thread is pretty much the history of my ‘career’ in web design. I particularly like this bit: “For a while people used to say “I’m a web designer” as a synonym for “I’m unemployed,” ‘cause any random sod who was halfway-handy with a computer could make a website and if you don’t have a job then you have more time to figure out how to make websites. We weren’t special, we were just fucking unemployed."
• My students can’t read 🪜 — “My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded."
• Nesrine Malik: What to do as murder is exploited to spread lies about race and privilege? Stand firm – fight back
• Tiny Awards nominations are open — A lovely celebration of the weird indie web.

Listening:

• Origin Story: Evangelicals pt 1 — This was personally very interesting as my dad became a born-again fundamentalist evangelical christian circa 1980 when he moved to Texas after the divorce and I’ve never properly understood what that meant, other than it made him weird for a decade or so. Anyway, this is more about the politics than the theology but even so is a very useful timeline of American evangelism up to that moment.

Status:

Mostly watching telly today. We finished off Dear England this evening which had a bit too much football for me but given the subject matter I’ll allow it. Where it really worked for me was as a history of the last decade, from Brexit through Covid to whatever the fuck is going on now, and how even to an apostate like me it actually did feel like the Gareth Southgate was the only sane person in charge of anything, even if it was just a football team.

The other telly was the first episode of Tip Toe, the new Russell Davies drama which I’d been reading about. Fi had watched it already and wanted me to catch up so we could watch the rest together. I knew it was going to be angry and a little dark but I didn’t anticipate how much it would affect me.

I don’t tend to get emotional watching films and TV. I enjoy the manipulation of my feelings and such but I tend to just admire the craft than actually feel affected. It happens occasionally, of course, but very rarely. Tip Toe left me feeling angry and upset and with a tightness in my throat that never bodes well. And also a little confused and uncertain.

I’m bascially a shut-in now and I’m very aware that I get most of my information about the outside world second hand, either from friends or on screens. I hope that awareness means I can be a little critical of what I receive, and I’m sure my bubble would be just as filtered however active I was in the world — that’s how perceptions and biases work. But I felt watching this that all my fears about the future were being confirmed.

This fucking scene. My god.

To be clear, I’m not part of the gay community, though I have plenty of friends who are. I don’t face any of the risks and dangers they do. But if a storm is coming they’re going to be among the first to be hit, and I will be standing with them as much as I’m able.

Davies reckons the storm is here.

There are still four episodes to go and it is a polemic scripted drama which is supposed to elicit a response, so we’ll see how I feel once it’s all over. I’m just a little surprised at what it provoked in me, like it was amplifying something already there. Not sure what to do with that right now, just wanted to get it out.

Reading:

• Links I would Gchat you if we were friends #772: Gratuitous pandering — A really good issue of this roundup newsletter that I’m struggling to pull just one link from, so have the whole thing.
• The best Steven Spielberg films, chosen by directors, critics and super-fans — A piece of fluff, for sure, but notable because the final review, of Jaws, is by my old compadre Cat, and before I realised she’s written it I thought it was the best. (The turgid Bradshaw introduction is utterly skippable.)
• What is drystone? — When I was a kid in the 80s my mum would pack me off to “outward bounds” holidays in the summer. Sometimes the big PGL or YHA places, sometimes something smaller. Once I was on this farm run by hippies where we did drystone walling, so I have the vaguest of memories of how it works. This piece goes into much more detail and I’ve subscribed for more as it’s super interesting. I wonder if my bit of wall is still standing…

Status:

Back when I was first getting signed off work for chronic fatigue I wasn’t getting any medical advice other than to “rest” and certainly no specific support as I sat on a waiting list, so I naturally tried to fill the time between crashes with projects. One of them was to make a shelf for the kitchen, only I would carve the brackets from wood like I’d seen in one of those homesteading YouTube channels where you’re invested and fascinated but you’re also waiting for the trad/nativist shoe to drop. Suffice to say the shoe did drop in the end and I never finished the carving. But I did make a shelf and it’s been propped up in the shed ever since, waiting for me to put it up with some basic metal brackets.

Today, armed with some paracetamol and a decent amount of breaks, I put it up.

Only took me two years.

Reading:

• My mother was forced to give me up for adoption. But when we finally met decades later, it was far from a fairytale ending — I’m not normally a fan of this sort of writing but something about this hit me in the feels. Possibly due to now being in the dead parents generation and realising there’s a shitload of history I’m now never going to be able to properly access.
• The Americans who saw all this coming but were ignored and maligned — Been looking at previous pieces by Toby Buckle and this one from December last year is a good one, interviewing “Cassandras” in the US who saw Trump’s fascism coming a decade ago but were told to stop being hysterical.
• The most predictable edit in history — An astute explanation of the drama at Wikipedia using the cathedral and bazaar metaphor to understand the relationship between Wikimedia’s management (cathedral) and it’s volunteer members (bazaar), what assumptions it’s based on and how it broke down.

Listening:

• The Miles Davis Story 3. Miles in Blue — The story of A Kind Of Blue, an album that temporally renders all other jazz irrelevant. Indeed, my awareness of most of Davis’s output is pretty poor due to this album being more than enough.

Music:

• Gabble Ratchets by Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra — Found via Weird Walk’s Gnome newsletter this is a group of primary school kids working with “the stuff that lies around gathering dust in school music cupboards”. The Gabble Ratchets of the title are “a pack of hellhounds who, at least in the version of the tale told in Todmorden, run their wild hunt each Halloween; from the zoomorphic outcrop Eagle Cragg to the summit of Stoodley Pike, a hill now marked with a monument to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but perhaps once the site of a prehistoric burial mound. That ‘gabble’ may be an old term for ‘corpse’ has led some to speculate that the hounds’ spectral journey may be an echo of an earlier corpse road or burial route and it is this idea that the PPYO have run with." Two tracks out now, rest of album follows on 26th.

Noticed the deposits in the rabbits' litter tray from their calcium-rich piss were looking quite beautiful.

Status:

Yup, as predicted I felt much better today. Still a little antsy but that passed. Had a visit from a friend who was also feeling antsy and I think we de-ants each other. (That feels like it should be a word, or am I thinking of lousy and delouse…) It was nice to listen to someone else have a good old moan for a change — my friends have been a bit reticent to unload on me this last year (and rightly so) but I can take it now, as long as they don’t want advice or nothing.

I’ve been tweaking the layout of these posts a bit. They look slightly different on the website (the bullet points are gone) and I’m experimenting with what we might call “secondary links”, indented further reading, if you like.

Hogwatching:

• Hedgehog Cam 25-29 May 2026 — More footage from our back garden.
  • See also, Hogs on Film, a portal to upload your hedgehog videos for academic and conservational research, which I will spend an afternoon doing soon.

Reading:

• How should we remember Ozzy Osbourne? — As someone with no skin the game but who’s been on the periphery of the slow and torturous acceptance of Birmingham’s heavy metal heritage (thanks to friends and acquaintances at Home of Metal) it’s been really strange to see the sanctification of Ozzy take place this last few years. Twenty years ago no-one, and I mean no-one, in this city gave a shit about it, and yet here we are. Utterly bemusing. I would love for someone to do a sit-down interview with Lisa Meyer of Capsule about the last couple of decades and how much credit she thinks her lot can take.
• Fascism is a scavenger, not a hunter: we can and must defend the UK’s Sikhs — Last week I linked to a piece by Toby Buckle about trans exclusion where he posited a “what-if the far right turned on the Sikh community”, something that seemed outlandish given their position as “model” immigrants. Within days it was happening.
  • An abysmal week of racism, cynicism and extremism — Ian Dunt: “We are no longer witnessing the radicalisation of the British right. It has already taken place. What we are witnessing now is how a radicalised British right behaves."
  • They were asked not to. They did it anyway. — Collating how the radicalised British right behaved.
• The teenagers enlisted as agents of mayhem by Russia and Iran 🪜 — Fascinating report on kids recruited on gaming sites to do scavenger hunt style quests which turn out to be spying or full-on terrorism.
  • via ARG/pervasive games guru Adrian Hon who has many thoughts (I expect a blog post to land soon after I publish this).
• RIP Anthony Head — So long, Ripper.

Watching:

• Building an owl nesting box out of a hollow log ‌(1:16:44)
• Cassette Deck Vader - Episode 1 — Auranauts are back, baby!

Listening:

• In Our Time: The Evolution of Trees — Really fascinating episode which I reckon could have gone on much longer. I have so many more questions.

Status:

Tired today, aggravated by feeling incredibly grumpy and annoyed after sleeping terribly. I have a new theory about recovering from a CFS crash. It’s like you’re emptying a tank of fatigue by slowly pumping it out and at the end is all the toxic shitty sediment. And once that’s out you’re OK again. This theory will be tested by my mood tomorrow morning but already this evening I’m feeling a bit better. Lance that boil.

Had an idea I want to note here, so I might revisit it another day and see if it’s bollocks or not. I was thinking about how uncertainty can be a good thing, as long as it’s not too paralysing. People (and I include myself in this) who a certain about a position or idea can get rigid in their definition and defence of it, to the point where what made the thing so powerful is slowly neutered. So I propose a radical uncertainty, constantly questioning and revising the foundations of your thing and ensuring it doesn’t succumb to your personal need to be sure. Or something like that. I think it’s connected to Bubba Wilson’s guerrilla ontology, in spirit anyway.

Reading:

• How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism 🪜 — You know you’re getting somewhere when the Economist leader writers are worried. But more seriously, I think they’re making a fundamental mistake here. Your moderate democratic socialists (which is what Mamdani et al are) aren’t against markets or competition when it’s fair. They’re against a system of free markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.
  • cf A brief post to explain to Eric Schmidt why he and his ilk are getting booed
• ‘An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival — I’m not convinced this can come about with some kind of awful war first, but it’s nice to see fully automated luxury communism back on the agenda. Thomas Piketty et al are on a roll right now.
• I must attempt to explain the LEGO scandal rocking YouTube, entire state of Utah — The amplification machine is amplifying too much again. Jesus.
• The startup recycling urine to make natural fertiliser — “If we were to recycle all the urine of people in Europe, I think we could cover around 30% of the nitrogen need,"
• RIP Marjane Satrapi

Watching:

• 1950’s French lamp restoration ‌(16:38)

Music:

• This Is Happening by LCD Soundsystem — “You wanted a hit but maybe we don’t do hits. I try and try, it ends up feeling kind of wrong."

Books on the go:

🎧 How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell [#---------] 13% (Though I might switch to the ebook as the reader’s voice is a bit jarring for me. Wish Jenny was reading it herself…)

Status:

Still pretty wiped out. Interestingly I’m getting out of breath doing the most mundane things, but I haven’t done any physically exhausting stuff for a long while. It’s all been cognitively demanding, which I guess shows how everything is connected. Mind-body duality my arse!

Reading:

• Living in an alive world — Jenny Odell with a long and thoughtful essay on deep listening and looking with soft eyes. Via her fab newsletter which prompted me to finally start her book today. I came across Jenny in the mid 20-teens with her digital work mining Google Maps for typological collages and her transition from that is still inspiring.
• The Rhyme-as-Reason effect — Why does the Satanic Panic have such longevity, long after its 80s heyday? Because it feels good to say. Something to bear in mind now the myth of “two-tier policing” is back on the far right agenda.
• Vote for hedgehogs to feature on banknotes — You know it makes sense.
• Britain was built for a different climate — A look at last week’s heatwave (he says, typing while in a jumper having brought the sunshade in due to high winds) through the lens of our buildings that were not built for this shit. Due to its position relative to the sun our brick terrace stays remarkably cool during hot weather, as long as the heatwave doesn’t last long enough for the bricks to heat up, then it’s an oven even when the weather turns cool again. I’m contemplating whitewashing the roof.

Status:

Still recovering from Sunday but definitely feeling better. Not much else to report.

Reading:

• Being quiet with other people — A lovely accounting of various quiet situations by Graham Dunning.
• Save the balti! Can Birmingham’s best dish come back from the brink? — When I first moved to Birmingham in the mid 90s as a student we would eat out all the time because balti’s were incredibly cheap. Friends visiting from other cities would be astonished at the bill. Amusing local note - the Royal Watan is 1.2 miles away from Stirchley, not “bordering” it. And we’re not gentrified yet.
• Labour’s Net Zero triumph and UK’s growing green economy worth more than £100bn a year, research finds
• Pope-ally wired! Why Mark E Smith’s maligned Catholic play is getting a reboot

Watching:

• Bench Grinder Restoration ‌(31:34)
• Practical Engineering: Why roads get washboards ‌(17:53) — These being the ripples in dirt roads that make them uncomfortable to drive on. Same physics as sand dunes and I found a lot of echoes here of minimalist music. Fascinating video.

Status:

I’d call this a managed crash day after yesterday’s writing binge. I should have spread that application over a few days but I only heard about it on Friday and the deadline was today, and once a deadline junkie always a deadline junkie. I woke up exhausted with the sense that I’d fucked it and had embarrassed myself, utterly catastrophising the thing. In the past that would have sent me off the rails but I now know that’s just a manifestation of mental fatigue and (all together now) it will pass. Still had to get through the day with a stupid brain that wouldn’t settle no matter how many dumb jigsaws I did, although a later-afternoon nap helped.

Reading:

• Cupcakes, bunting and a bus stuck in the mud: the funeral of Martin Parr — Exactly as you’d expect it to be.
• The attack on competence — “Competence is naturally a threat to this form of legitimacy-building, as it means that any lowly engineer at a company can, in theory, tell the CTO that they’re full of shit and have it be taken seriously. It’s as though the emperor is sharing his royal court with a whole lot of people who constantly tell him that he’s naked, and he can’t have them executed because they run all the affairs of state."
• Garbage Day on the YouTuber Hollywood gold rush — Ryan’s trying to figure out whether and how the culture of YT maps on Hollywood, but I think it’s analogous to 80s British directors who cut their teeth on TV advertising. Tony Scott et al brought a very specific populist aesthetic to cinema that eclipsed the old new guard of the 70s, and that’s possibly what’s happening here. Or not!

Listening:

• The Miles Davis Story — I’ve been enjoying the 100th birthday shows the BBC has been putting out and this documentary series has Clarke Peters with his fantastic voice telling the full story.

Music:

• Father and Son from Inferno by Boards of Canada. — As a middle aged man of a certain disposition I’ve of course been listening to the new BoC and to be honest it hasn’t blown me away, except for this one track which I love. I’m sure people have perfectly synced speech samples to a beat before but this is wonderful. “No I’m not calling him a liar”. Just wish it went on for longer. 12” version please!

Downloading:

• Links to PDFs of 96 left-wing books — You never know when they might come in handy…

Status:

I applied for an art thing today. No idea if I’ll get it but it was good to write the application, my first in a long while.

And having just submitted it I don’t really have the capacity to write anything more.

Reading:

• Oscar-winning Star Wars editor Marcia Lucas dies aged 80 — As has often been noted, Star Wars was a hot mess before she got her scissors to it.
• The household battery revolution that could change energy bills … and the world — This report from Australia reads like a sponsored post but I guess some things are just all up-side. “Home batteries are in the middle of a revolution, large grid-scale batteries have collapsed in price in the last two years, and the quality of them has remarkably improved, with far less critical minerals, a far longer lifetime, and with fire hazard all but eliminated. That is now feeding into the home battery market, and the home battery of today is vastly superior to the home battery of a couple of years ago."

Watching:

• Casablanca - Marseillaise Scene (extended edition) ‌(5:17)

Listening:

• In Our Time: The Welsh Marches — Actually listened to this the other night but forgot to note it. Was surprised how blasé the Welsh academics were about the Norman colonisation of their country. I remember visiting when I was younger and suddenly figuring out why there are so many castles in Wales.
• You’re Wrong About: Rainbows — Some fascinating stuff about the pre-science explanations of rainbows (from the bridge to Asgard to Aristotle nearly getting it right) and how they actually work, wrapped up in a characteristically shambolic, rambling conversation which I would find annoying were it not the real reason I enjoy this podcast.

Admin:

The link I posted yesterday about plug-in solar in the UK was nonsense AI slop. Thanks to Phil for letting me know. “Having spent a while googling, there is so much similar stuff around, all presumably hallucinating. Meanwhile it’s impossible to verify exactly because who’s going to actually buy the document to check? It’s people on Reddit saying ‘but these blog posts say x’ vs someone saying ‘but I don’t see that in my copy of Amendment 4’." The best mark for a con is someone who wants something to be true, so they’ll accept anything that confirms that desire. Fuckers got me.

Oop, just after publishing I see Phil actually posted about this today.

Status:

Bit of a tired day. Had some brighter moments and a bit of a mood slump at one point but otherwise just pottered and read stuff.

Just saw a big fat hedgehog in the garden, checking out our nesting home. Reckon she might be pregnant.

Reading:

• New exhibition to celebrate legacy of pioneering Birmingham photographer Rhonda Wilson — Really glad Rhonda is finally being recognised for her work, both for Birmingham and photography in general. I only knew her for a few years before she died but she always had time for me and is one of the reasons I decided to give this art thing a go. Thanks, Annette, for doing this.
• How to escape the 21st century: Adam Curtis talks to Dean Kissick — “I would argue that it’s not that reality is dissolving, it’s that the parts of society that we thought would describe what was real to you don’t work any longer." I’ve long had a curious relationship with Adam Curtis (or at least the Adam Curtis that presents in his work and interviews) where we’re completely on the same page but then I get a visceral reaction to his ideas about “the self” which feel like an attack on things I find sustaining and valuable, at least for myself. But I’m slowly coming around to the idea that maybe he’s right and I need to examine my need to do whatever this is I’m doing right now a bit more critically. Anyway, this starts a bitty (it was published in Vice after all) but there’s a couple of sections where Curtis just talks and they’re very good.
• Plug-in solar panels UK 2026 — The complete guide — Was wondering if there was any progress on this and yes, it’s happening. A new standard (BS 7671 Amendment 4) came into force in April and approved devices will be on sale in July. Not sure we have the budget to invest in a full kit right now but it’s all very exciting! [I’m reliably informed this post is AI slop and full of inaccuracies. I’ve rescinded the link. Bastards.]
• Caption Comics Festival plunders a shipload of guests for its pirate themed 2026 event — The zine fest (as I guess you’d call it today) of my 20s which was revived last year is back again and that’s a pretty impressive lineup. Wish I could go but it’d probably be too overwhelming.
• How Durham Pride beat Reform’s funding axe with help from the miners — This brings up a conundrum I’ve been struggling with for a while now. When you rescue something after its funding has been cut you’re basically saying the funding isn’t needed. This is what the libertarian wing of Reform want, as evidenced by the last two paragraphs in this piece. And I don’t like it because it’s saying it’s OK for minority to just look after themselves, rather than we all should look after each other, not least because one day we might be part of a minority.

So what were the skies like when you were young?

Status:

Did some more writing this afternoon. I appear to writing a short booklet on how to do composting. Not because the world desperately needs another one but it’s a subject I know back to front so I can focus on the words and sentences rather than the content, if you get me. It’s been fun noodling with how something comes across – I think I’ve always enjoyed editing and redrafting as much if not more than getting the first draft down. It’s sort of like I’d imagine stand-up comedy works. You come up with a joke in your head which amuses only you and then you iterate and improve it over many nights of gigs until finally it’s bullet proof.

Other than that the usual CFS type of day. Did some pottering, had a family visit, watched the birds.

I did come across an open call for artists which I thought I definitely wouldn’t be able to commit to but it turned out to be five sessions spread over a full year, one per season then a conclusion. That’s the sort of pace I could do! Now to see if I fit the brief (or, as I was mentored into thinking, if the brief fits my practice, such as it is).

Reading:

• The 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech — I found this list fascinating because most of these aren’t a problem for me. Either I know how to use the thing in question properly, I understand why it’s shit so it doesn’t perplex me, or I’ve developed tactics for bypassing the annoyance. So this is a one of those rare views into how “normal” people use the internet and how much they hate it. And that doesn’t make me a better person, just means I’ve been around a while, like a long-time resident of a big city who knows how to move through it with ease. It infuriates me that this shit is considered good enough. Any improvement would make my life better too. Do better, tech wankers!
• If CMAT is an affront to the male gaze and Olivia Rodrigo is indulging it, how exactly should women dress? — Laura Snapes: “Every possibility for how a woman in the public eye might look has been co-opted by an agenda that would rather tell her who she is rather than listen to who she is saying she is." I really like CMAT’s music and while I’m not so keen on Rodrigo’s stuff (because it’s totally not aimed at me) I love that she asked the Breeders to support her stadium tour, reinventing them as cool aunties for a new generation of girls. Fuck anyone who criticises these awesome women (or any woman) for what they wear.
• Cynicism is a luxury; hope is a necessity — Or, if you’re able to ignore the state of the world, that’s because it’s working in your favour. via
• American tips to beat the heat when you don’t have air conditioning — I was nodding along until I hit “swamp cooler” so I looked it up. Oooh!

Status:

Couldn’t get to sleep until 4am or something which was annoying, though I did enjoy the lightning through the curtains, and watching the storms bubble up on the weather radar through the night.

So a bit rough today. Not terrible and had some bright spots but definitely a down curve. Maybe I did too much writing? I did notice that in the paragraph yesterday about doing some writing I used the word “start” three times which should not have got through my drafting process, so something was definitely off.

Reading:

• Are you sitting uncomfortably? How Backrooms upended the horror movie — I’ve only really been tangentially away of the Backrooms photo thing over the years, just chalking it up to another liminal spaces late capitalism thing. The movie does look rather intriguing though.
• ‘Not many kids had gay dads who died of Aids’: Andrew Durham and Sofia Coppola on movie memoir Fairyland — I’m a sucker for this kind of shit.
• Can these dumbphone evangelists convince you to dump smartphones — A while ago I was looking into getting a dumb phone but decided to let my current iPhone wither into irrelevance first. And looking at this company’s plans I reckon I’ve already limited it to most of what they provide. Still spend too much time on the bloody thing though…

Watching:

• Ze Frank’s True Facts: The mystery of how bees build ‌(16:11) — Why hexagons? And how?
• Torbjörn Åhman Blacksmithing - Making my own knife and fork ‌(23:49) — This one was particularly fascinating.

Listening:

• Origin Story: JK Rowling pt 2

Status:

A slightly less hot but still pretty damn hot day spent in the garden. Fi’s often talks about moving to a hot place (she got a taste for Indonesia in her youth) and I’m like, nah, I like it here. But who knows, I could get used to this.

Started doing some writing. Managed about 500 words before the tinnitus started but am fairly pleased with what emerged. It’s a start.

Reading:

• The establishment reaction to Andy Burnham’s rise is a sign of the fight to come — ‌"The forces ranged against transformation […] already have the City, the rightwing press, corporate lobbying, the Treasury worldview and the bond market. Progressive Britain has no equivalent machinery."
• Ignorance is Bliss — A letter written to the future self of someone undergoing a memory wipe. (Fiction, obv)
• Melangell: The female saint with a message for the ages — “Today marks the feast day of Melangell, the 6th-century Welsh patron saint of hares, small animals, and the natural environment."
• Sprouts on a windowsill, not on subscription: the quiet radicalism of growing things — “Nothing radicalised me like growing vegetables."
• How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America — Marking the publication of a new biography. I drifted away from reading Doonesbury maybe a couple of decades ago when I stopped getting the print Guardian and an RSS feed for the strip vanished. I rediscovered it recently (RSS feed) and rather fortuitously the reruns have reached a point close to where I stopped back then. He’s only doing new Sundays these days but he’s still got it. One of the greats.
• What does a burst bubble actually look like? — Garbage Ryan looks at the dot.com bubble of our youths for clues as to the forthcoming, inevitable AI crash.

Looking:

• Sophie Green’s maximalist, technicolour vision of Britain’s fringes — For an exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation. ‌“Many of these worlds sit outside mainstream visibility, not because they’re peripheral, but because they’re often overlooked or sometimes simplified in how they’re represented. What interested me was the richness within them – the kinship, humour, pride, devotion and rawness that exists inside these gatherings.”
• How a Houston company got its art on the walls of stoners across America — I had a feeling the Houston Blacklight & Poster Company had a connection with the underground comics boom but I must be thinking of a different poster producer. Are posters still a thing? They were a massive form of cultural dissemination when I was a youth.
• Dirty Little Zine libary — 8 page zines made with a simple online pagination tool. Throw your pics into it, add some text and boom, a printable little mag.

Status:

Second bloody hot day in a row which I mostly spent in the garden reading a book.

Reading:

• Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on making art with AI and what the discourse is missing — These two are a couple of figures I paid close attention to in the mid 2010s. Their work informed a lot of my thinking and I held then in high regard. Since I moved on from what has become called AI Art they fell off my radar so it was interesting to read a detailed discussion of where they’re at in 2026. I find myself incredibly torn. Some of their work and ideas seem really interesting and I appreciate the desire to avoid hype and doom while just focussing on what can be made with this new stuff. But then some of the stuff they’re making, and the way they’re making it, just seems boring. And that’s a really big problem. Still, I’m happy they’ve managed to find a way to do work that excites them. We should all be so fortunate!
• Wikipedia fired a bunch of union organisers — This is pretty frustrating. The reason Wikipedia has succeeded so well is, for all its flaws, it doesn’t behave like a typical tech corporation. But this is straight out of the corp playbook.
• The interracial cuck porn theory of everything — I don’t know if I’d recommend reading this. I certainly couldn’t read it without some judicious skimming. It’s one of those pieces that explains a lot but you come out the other end wishing you didn’t need it explained to you. To be honest, the introduction is probably enough.

Status:

Recently I’ve been attempting to befriend a local cat. None of the cats like us, probably because we shoo’ed them away when they first tried to stalk the rabbits. But they do love the sun-traps in our garden, so whenever we go out there’s a rapid exodus of feline over the fences. But not the other day.

Above is Luna, a grumpy old tabby with a wonky eyelid. She was sitting on our lawn when I went to top up the hedgehog cafe and, for once, did not bolt. Since I was putting cat food in the cafe and she’s a cat I figured I’d give it a go. She’s definitely not friendly. She won’t let me stroke her without a swipe. She’s not particularly interested in the food. But she’s not running away. It’s a start.

Weather today was hot, which is curiously the perfect weather for someone with CFS because it just forces you to stop. And everyone else has slowed right down so they’re all on your baseline.

I noticed in the weather forecast that it’s due to be a minimum 18c tonight, but next Monday it will be a maximum 18c during the day. Hmm.

Hogwatching:

• Hedgehog Cam 13-25 May — A compilation of hedgehog activity in our garden over the last few nights. I’m trying out different camera angles with varying levels of success.

Reading:

• To understand Britain’s new politics, look no further than this Shakespearean saga in Worcestershire — I’m mildly amused that the tenor of cross-party electoral reform in this country could be defined by local councillors. I mean, god bless them but they can be a pretty variable eccentric bunch.
• The end of trans rights in the UK is the start of democratic collapse — Scary headline but the basic point stands, and this essay has all the receipts of how something that was unimaginable across the mainstream political spectrum a decade ago has become “common sense”. First they came for, and all that.
• If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you — A nice Sam Kriss rant for a sunny afternoon.

Listening:

• Adam Buxton: Bridget Christie & Alice Boyd — Not a top tier interview - I can see why it took a couple of years to edit into shape - but always nice to hear Bridget.
• How to tax billionaires — Talking to “economist Gabriel Zucman about his decades long research on wealth inequality and discuss the pros and cons of wealth taxation policies”.

Status:

Recovery day, as expected, though once I got over the morning terrors I was able to do a bit more reading than is usual post-crash, as evidenced below.

Am having regrets at not sorting out heatwave stuff in the months since the last heatwave, such as a solar powered ceiling fan for the geodesic dome to get a bit of breeze going. And an ice-lolly mould set.

Someone on the street is selling a power bank and solar panels for a couple of grand. It’s so tempting but still a couple of grand over my no-income budget right now.

Fi had a friend over this morning. When I went to say hello the two of them were sitting in the garden drinking tea wearing summery dresses with floppy hats. At one point Wally hopped by and it looked like some idyllic painting of ladies in times gone by.

Noting for the record that ten days ago people on the allotment chat were talking about frost damage on their plants and tomorrow it’s forecast to be 31c. That’s quite a notable swing. The weather continues to get weirder on this island.

Reading:

• Hard Rain: The battle over weather modification — Really nice long-read written by a metrologist which I highly recommend spending time with. Ostensibly about cloud seeding companies (who are treated fairly neutrally here despite their dubious geoengineering goals) but going much further into the nature of weather and mankind’s historical efforts to understand and control it. “Climate change is an enormous accomplishment. From an engineering perspective, the ability to coordinate activities to modify the average temperatures of an entire planet […] is a realization of powers as considerable as anything humanity has achieved before. […] We are also, as with our other emergent powers, quite apparently terrible at it.
  • Related earworm: 🎶 Sparklehorse - Rainmaker 🎶
• David Byrne looks at water recycling efforts in California — Not mentioned here but one of the exciting potential uses of excess solar power on sunny days is water reclamation, either desalination or recycling.
• What is agrivoltaic farming? — One of the more frustrating arguments against fields of solar panels is it reduces food production. It doesn’t if done properly and can even increase yields.
• Hating AI is good, actually — Notable for when the author says they don’t really have a handle on what defines “AI” but they do know what they’re against, and that’s what matters. The non-meaningfulness of the “AI” term is a deliberate ploy by advocates as it creates a moving target which can be good (pattern-matching to detect cancer in scans) and can be bad (deskilling the workforce, etc). Best to look at what the system does to find its true purpose.
• Molly Crabapple finds the pleasure in politics — Nice interview chronicling her origins in burlesque clubs to her work documenting protests and war zones. ‌"People like to divide the world into two different realms: the sexy and the serious. There are the hot slutty girls in corsets doing some sort of shimmy, and then there are the serious men who talk about politics and shape the future. And that division is so stupid."
• Sentiers newsletter #404 — I’ve already pulled out a couple of links but the whole thing is a nice coherent read this week (with only one tedious LLM thing).

Watching:

• A grammatical murder mystery ‌(2:29) — Elle Cordova is back, personifying language’s dots and dashes as only she can. She is SO good at this.
• Cinemastix on the cinematography of Ex Machina ‌(11:19) — I really should do a re-watch of Garland’s films sometime.
• Laura Kampf ‌(20:04)

Listening:

• Origin Story: JK Rowling pt 1 — A fairly even-handed account of Rowling’s history up to the writing of that essay in 2020, told alongside milestones in the codification British gender critical feminism. Much more interesting than I was expecting, though I’d like some insight into why the left is much more TERFy in the UK than in other countries.

Bookmarking:

• The Luddite Lab Resource Hub — For those fighting “AI” and automation in the workplace. I’ve noticed a few people I know are undergoing “restructuring” in their jobs so this might be useful.