Status:
The post-exertional crash came, but of course it was a bit weird and didn’t make sense. Last night I went to bed feeling OK but just couldn’t get to sleep – no wired anxiety, just boringly awake. Eventually I nodded off at 7am and then woke up about 11 after a stress dream with a splitting headache and chronic fatigue legs, had a really grumpy few hours and then it cleared in the afternoon. Right now I’m feeling fine I guess (?) but have no idea what’s going on because it doesn’t map anything that’s happened before. All I know is I probably should rest for a few days.
While resting I got a delivery of a copy of Desmond Morris' 1977 book Manwatching which I’d found for a fiver. It looks like it’s come straight from my childhood bookshelves, leading me to wonder if it’s the same copy (the price is snipped from the corner of the jacket in the same way my mother would do) but I’m sure it’s not. I had a skim through it in the garden and it seems to hold up remarkably well with a lot of photos from the Magnum archive, which explains why they stuck with me. I wish I’d had it to hand when I was doing work around gestures humans make to interact with machines, riffing off the late Nicholas Nova’s book Curious Rituals which fed directly into the mess that was Instructions for Humans. It’d be fun to see how much of my fascination with that was seeded by Morris.
When I was at the allotment, sowing the seeds of my fatigue crash, I was chatting to sister Lucy about Manwatching and she had exactly the same memories of discovering it on the bookshelf and being obsessed with this portal to another way of thinking, albeit three or so years after me.
I’ve been thinking about things I might write about at length over time and a proper dive into this book is becoming a good candidate, not so much for whether it’s a good book but for what it meant to me. I wonder if any other Gen X kids have memories of it.
Reading:
- Iron Maiden on 50 years of heavy metal, hard living – and hopeless communication skills — I was never a Maiden fan but a bunch of my mates were so I have a peripheral awareness of their impact. I have this amusing memory of when the fashion suddenly changed from double-denim to big shorts, though I think that was more Anthrax? Like I say, not really my thing.
- How the heck does Shazam work? — I kinda knew this due to my curiosity about machine learning a decade ago which uses a similar idea of reducing a noisy signal to a short string of numbers, but it’s good to see it spelled out in plain English and is, I think, fairly similar to how human brains do pattern matching.
- Trump’s war on the global food supply
- The South Bank skatepark turns 50
Watching:
- The thing that threw me the most about neurotypical living was their homes. (2:00) — Much identification here, but when did “neurotypical” become the go-to for what used to be “normie” or “straight”? Do people still talk about “the straights” in a non-gender way? (Growing up in Croydon we had neighbours who were like this who my mum called the “The Borings”. Yes she could be a bit of snob, but they really were.)
Listening:
- Doomscroll: Natalie Wynn: How Online Politics Became Real Life — Looooong 3 hour conversation with the video essayist Contrapoints which flew by and I got a lot out of. Wynn is above all a trained philosopher who realised she could do more fun philosophy stuff outside of the academy and this really comes across in her thought processes. She gets a lot of flack but, transphobia/misogyny aside, I think it’s because she can’t not unpick a flawed argument, and righteous people can’t cope with that. I’m also getting rather fond of host Joshua Citarella’s mission to figure out how the left can fight back by talking to as many people as possible and working through his ideas in public. You can see he knows it’s a herculean task and he’s taking it one step at a time.
Music:
- Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem — A mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the TP theme, with a lovely video of clips from seasons 1 and 2, which I really do need to rewatch sometime.
Purchasing:
- Badges from Delicious Creative — These popped up on my Mastodon feed and on a whim I ordered a bunch. Turned out my order was #2 and she’d just started selling them! They arrived midweek and are really nice quality. I went for the Reject set, the trans flag and a Fuck AI. Now I just need to go outside so other people can see them. (If any local friends who still walk the streets want one for free, hit me up.)
