Status:
My old friend Gareth popped over for a catchup today. I was very wary as to whether to go ahead after yesterday but I woke up feeling remarkably OK so decided to risk it, with plenty of opportunities to bail. Managed it all fairly well and despite needing a proper lie down afterwards am not feeling too rough this evening.
It was, of course, lovely to catch up. We met circa 1999 when working at the big Dillons bookstore in Birmingham. That building is now the Apple store. Now there’s a metaphor for the 21st century if you ever needed one.
Overnight listening:
Reading:
- The joyful wrath of the skater librarian - by the author of Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides: A History of Badass Women Skateboarders.
- Inside Trans Mission, a night of solidarity and joy for a community under stress. - Dorian Lynskey reports on the “Live Aid for trans rights” concert. Sly of him to note “around the turn of the decade, negative coverage of trans people in the UK press increased exponentially” in the Guardian (which to be fair is much better since they ejected The Observer).
- Quaker Meeting House suffers second Met Police raid - “Quakers have been accustomed to oppression by the state for over 350 years."
- Sam Kriss: You’ll regret it - “There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country… They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them."
- The web is bearable with RSS: And don’t forget “Reader Mode." - Cory Doctorow on how he customises his browser to make reading on the web less unpleasant. I do a lot of this too, but it’s a real arms race. I’d go so far as to say it’s like a game, figuring out how to stop the website from annoying me with increasingly esoteric blocks and tricks. The satisfaction of wrestling a terrible website with great content into submission is real, if not for the faint hearted.
- A death scholar on why we need to stop being naive about dying - “I always hear, ‘Can’t you just put me into a nice meadow and put a sapling on top of me?'” Gould says. “But you will kill that tree. And also, where is this meadow?" Fascinating stuff, but annoyingly doesn’t go into exactly why it’ll kill the tree. (Presumably because the decomposition process doesn’t release nutrition and probably damages the roots. You could probably plant the tree a year or two later.)
Watching:
- Ants Pants: Finishing my homemade log splitter (2:28:21)
- 3.55am in Agadir, Morocco (1:43)