Little bug, large S.
Status:
I’m declaring this a rest week, because I have nothing in my diary and it seems like a good opportunity to find this ever-elusive baseline. So it’s a diet of steady pottering with no big adventures and plenty of rests.
I decided on a new chronic fatigue goal: to write something that isn’t responsive. I’m very happy with how this blog is going but it’s all in response to my day and stuff I’ve seen online, so the framework and boundaries are established and manageable. The next step is to write something from scratch where I have to decide what it’s about and where the edges are. This is a fairly daunting proposition, but not much more daunting than diary/link blogging was a year ago.
Overnight listening:
- Iran: The Three Ayatollahs - From Revolution to Dynasty - hopping back on the Empire podcast for a special about Iran, essentially one of those explainers from someone who’s actually been paying attention to what’s been going on there.
Reading:
- AI job loss research ignores how AI is utterly destroying the internet - While agree with pretty much everything here, I think the rot set in a long time ago with the legitimisation of the SEO industry and the dominance of Instagram et al. And, let’s be frank, it’s very clear most people don’t want to engage with “the internet” because it’s hard work, just like they didn’t want to go to the library or whatever. Whether that’s because they’re too busy to too lazy is moot - most people would rather get a possibly wrong answer from a bot than do the work.
- Compost After Reading is out - Lovely story of how it evolved from a handout to a proper book.
Watching:
- Practical Engineering on the Los Angeles aqueduct (22:58) - I read about how LA diverts so much water from Owens Valley in another state that the subsequent dried out lake is a major source of pollution in Jay Owen’s book Dust, which I highly recommend. Good to see Grady’s take on it from an engineering perspective.
- Dune: Part Three trailer (2:29) - plenty of time to prepare myself for a trip to the cinema…
TIL:
- Field Notes and Fieldnotes are two different things. (Fiona is submitting to the latter and I got quite confused.)