Is that a rabbit jumping out of that tree?

Status:

Slept in and pretty much marked today as a rest day, though it hasn’t been the crash I was fearing. Realised I haven’t had a proper crash now for a week, though it feels like longer, which is a warning sign in itself. How I feel at any given point is not an accurate measure of how I actually am.

Found myself wondering today about what being recovered from CFS would be like and if this is a hint of it. I feel a different kind of tired today – the ‘normal’ kind where you do an exertion and your body recovers from it. CFS-tired is feeling exhausted disproportionately to the exertion, or without any exertion at all. Today I just feel like someone who hasn’t done any exercise for a couple of years and then did a thing, which implies I can improve by doing some exercise.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’m better. It’s been a week and CFS has a habit of coming in waves. There’s a very good chance I’ll be fucked again soon and all this ‘progress’ will feel undone. But right now I see a glimmer of hope and by the gods I’m going to grab onto it while it’s there.

Reading:

• Grievance poisoning in the first degree — The technofascist overtones of the Palantir manifesto have bubbled up into the mainstream discourse over contracts with the UK government, and this is good to see. These bastards should not be let anywhere near our stuff. But it’s worth noting how intellectually bankrupt and philosophically idiotic their whole thing is. “This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at — given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect." See also Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto.
• Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt review – life after Paul Auster — I was reading Paul Auster before I discovered him and his wife were super-hot.
• What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’ — ‌Though Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, it was the murder of 6 million Jews that turned it from a pipe dream into a viable political project – one that has always combined two key strands, Bartov said. “One is a settler-colonial, ethno-national movement, and the other is the liberation and emancipation and rescue of a persecuted minority.” If the Jews had had a state of their own, the case went, they would have escaped this unspeakable horror, he said, “and this was not an entirely vacuous argument”.
• Mazdak creates Utopia — I saw a comment about this saying all these comics are basically the same: historic guy invents socialism/democracy/etc, is killed for it. Yup!

Watching:

• Image Empire ‌(3:36) — Short film introducing a new work by Alan Warburton whose work I really admired a decade or so back but lost touch with as I moved away from the digi-art space. The film is a really clear and accessible introduction to some important themes around data capture and how we conceive of reality, and I’m going to enjoy reading the field guide that accompanies it. (Also I really like how the rabbit motif in the video calls back to one of Warburton’s earlier works, and a big favourite of mine, Dust Bunny.)
• Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble ‌(3:17)
• Practical Engineering: The wild story of the Teton Dam failure ‌(19:22)
• Vintage Culbuto game restoration ‌(14:26)

Music:

• Philophobia by Arab Strap — Had the urge to listen to some of their earlier stuff and this brought back memories of being a confused 20-something making dumb drunken emotional mistakes with other confused 20-somethings.

Bookreading:

• Swamp Thing by Rick Veitch — Revisiting for the completion of the story this summer.
• Manwatching by Desmond Morris — I grabbed a bootleg scan from a shadow library (look at me, all darkwebwarrior) and enjoyed seeing images I’d not seen since I was 10 or so. Published in 1977 it’s obviously dated badly in places but has an optimism and seemingly a determination to see the whole of humanity as one coherent species. It’s also surprisingly explicit for something my mother left on the bottom shelf and presumably knew I was accessing. I wonder if would we let great-neph M read this? (Caveat - I’ve been skimming and not reading the copy in depth.)

Telly:

• Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord — I’m always amazed at how much more exciting and visceral these cartoons are compared with the staid and plodding live action series. Also, bonus Richard Ayoade on Brit-droid-voice-acting duty.