Status:
Took things a bit easier today. The main task was setting up the hammock in the dome with wifi and shade so that I might lie in the hammock with wifi and shade. Which I then proceeded to do. I guess operation get-off-the-bloody-sofa can be declared a success (at least until it rains).
Have updated the About page, so go read that if you want to know about things.
Mothballed the BugPowder zine archive for now. I might bring it back in a different form but I don’t have the capacity or interest to finish the project properly and I had a request to remove something, so I decided to just pull it for now. And it had fuckall traffic so no-one will miss it. All data is safe, of course.
While I’m not interested in the zines I am quite interested in how I put the site together. It was originally just a single status page with stats on how much I’d scanned but it grew into thousands of pages. If I’d intended it to be that big I would never have started but by iterating a tiny bit every day I created a pretty impressive resource. I’m wondering if I can replicate that with something I actually care about now, and how I might start without scaring myself off with my goals…
Overnight listening:
Music:
Reading:
- Homework till midnight and ‘one breakdown a week’: the mysterious art school keeping a forgotten style alive - The trompe d’oeil school in Brussels.
- Hundreds of hungry mosquitoes, a student volunteer and a mesh suit helped us figure out how these deadly insects reach their targets - Fantastic 3D visualisation of mosquito flight patterns. And yes, I’m itching all over from reading this.
- Not new. And that’s OK. - Josie George on the sameness of every day with chronic fatigue. “I am in the same place with the same views I’ve had my whole adult life so I can’t describe to you anything new that you will not have seen or heard about before. […] And it’s ridiculous how much this feels like failure." One thing photography taught me was nothing is ever the same. The world is constantly changing in ways imperceptible in the moment but evident over time. Some of my favourite art (Noah K Everyday, Sitting in a Room) explores and embraces those micro-changes because they access a deep truth.
- The curious origins of the dollar symbol - In 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began minting coins using silver from a mine in Joachimsthal. The coin was dubbed the joachimsthaler, which was then shortened to thaler, the word that proceeded to spread around the world. It was the Dutch variation, the daler, that made its way across the Atlantic in the pockets and on the tongues of early immigrants, and today’s American-English pronunciation of the word dollar retains its echoes. Thaler thaler bills y’all.
- NHS was ‘on brink of collapse’ during pandemic, Covid inquiry finds - We have a friend who worked on the Covid wards at Birmingham Hospital. She has PTSD and has had fuckall support for it.