The mason bees are methodically filling up the bee hotel in a very satisfactory manner.

Status:

Bit of a slump day. Headache for most of it and didn’t have the energy to go do a thing I wanted to do. Managed a bit of pottering in the afternoon though and cumulatively did a fair bit in tiny chunks with lots of breaks. So that’s a small victory, I guess.

Reading:

• The ungovernable country? Why Britain keeps losing prime ministers — Interesting comparison to post-WWII France which apparently had similar instability in governance.
• Marcin Wichary on the Fits on a Floppy manifesto — This bit, I think, has resonance for life in general: “If you reduce tech history to just nostalgia, it won’t be that useful. But if you look at it as inspiration, you might find some truly wonderful and meaningful stuff in there."
• A whole new world — A review of ‌Disneyland and the Rise of Automation which uses Walt’s fascination with cybernetics and the Ford motor company’s production line to shine a light on our modern condition where automation is not hidden but aestheticised and mimicked.
• A world without heroes — I definitely have significant issues with some of these thoughts on “what it means to be a man”, but it’s got me thinking about why I don’t fully agree, and that makes it worth reading. Especially as it feels like we’re entering a moment where it’s not going to be enough to be a bystander to toxic bullshit. How do we step up without falling into outdated cliches about manliness?

Downloading:

• Insurgent Thought — A small archive of PDFs and ePubs that Warren Ellis describes as “the internet version of tiny bookshops I used to visit in the Eighties and Nineties, when you really had to put effort into hunting that shit down. Grubbing around in the back of Housmans and the occult bookshops down the road from Covent Garden, that spinner-rack of weird zines hidden in the corner of Forbidden Planet."