The view from my hammock.
Status:
Last night’s sleep was a bit rough. For some reason my teeth were hurting, not in a call-the-dentist way, more like there was a pressure on them. Fi thought it might be something to do with the trigeminal nerve, but that information hasn’t really helped, and anyway it’s a bit better today. Probably similar to my sinus pain which flares up when I get overly fatigued and/or stressed, not because I have sinusitis.
So I’ve been trying to take it easy again, which is never simple. A brief potter can quickly become an exhausting activity requiring a sit down, as I found when I went to shave a few millimetres off a piece of wood for the bath panel. Shouldn’t have been a big deal but left me gasping for breath. Dammit.
The night was also disturbed by woodpeckers at 6am. They’ve been spotted on the terracotta chimney pots on the terraces around here bashing out a string of taps. Apparently this is a mating call which they would normally do on hollow branches and the like but clay pots have clearly better acoustics. It’s lovely when you hear it out in the garden with all the other bird sounds, but when it’s on your house at dawn it echoes down the chimney like a power-drill. Not the chorus we ordered. Here’s a video taken by a neighbour.
Reading:
- Masking my autism made me sick - Lovely piece of writing about getting an adult diagnosis. As always I can’t identify with the specifics (if you’ve met one autistic person you’ve met one autistic person) but a lot of the emotions rings true.
- There’s a massive new crater on the Moon - Before and after pics are in the linked to PDF.
- Some Kind of Divine Manipulatrix - Grant Morrison at Vertigo - Another chapter of Liz Sandifer’s big book which, as ever, will be of very little interest to most of you but of great interest to maybe a couple of you, and that’s all good. Notable for the bit on Kill Your Boyfriend, one of the few Morrison comics I actually like, and which I didn’t realise was intended as “a modern Dionysic myth of ecstatic violence”.
- I regret the blood pact i have made with iCloud Photos - I too have made this pact. While photos from my “proper” cameras are all backed up in various places my phone photos are all on iCloud. I could and should start the process of copying them off there, and implement a better system going forward, but frankly, who has time?
- Capitalism makes women of us all A good analysis of the recent Louis Theroux doc (which I confess I haven’t had a chance to watch yet). I liked this line: "an accelerated, mutated misogyny that’s too ever-shifting and unsustainable for even them to actually fully embody — because it is optimized not for the individual man, or even just for the benefit of a broader patriarchal-capitalist society, but for the needs and wants of the algorithm." Also some good stuff on empathy: “The problem is that the demand for empathy, explicitly or not, is often more specifically the demand that we have more empathy for those men than for the women they’d like to see dead or barred from public life."
Watching:
- Lindsay Ellis: Did Disney Really Steal Aladdin? (1:07:06) - Lindsay talking about Disney and Broadway musicals. It’s like it’s [some years ago] all over again.
- Come and mix my nutrients with me! (5:41)
- Olivier Gomis builds a kitchen island (33:12)
RIP:
- Glen Baxter - His work took the form of a deceptively simple template: a crisp ink drawing, often hand-coloured in crayon, paired with a caption that bore no logical relationship to what was depicted above it. Cowboys debated the merits of abstract painting in the Wild West. Gentlemen in tweed discussed matters of cultural importance in increasingly improbable settings.
- The Oasis indoor market - for my generation of youths, and a few before and after, this was where all the cool shops were and where we got our bongs and piercings. It’s being demolished, because that how Birmingham do.
Clicking:
- As Slow As Possible - Classic arcade games like Pong and Breakout, except they’re agonisingly slow. I love this and could play for hours. Perfect brain calmer. Great soundtrack too.