Status:
A slightly less hot but still pretty damn hot day spent in the garden. Fi’s often talks about moving to a hot place (she got a taste for Indonesia in her youth) and I’m like, nah, I like it here. But who knows, I could get used to this.
Started doing some writing. Managed about 500 words before the tinnitus started but am fairly pleased with what emerged. It’s a start.
Reading:
- The establishment reaction to Andy Burnham’s rise is a sign of the fight to come — "The forces ranged against transformation […] already have the City, the rightwing press, corporate lobbying, the Treasury worldview and the bond market. Progressive Britain has no equivalent machinery."
- Ignorance is Bliss — A letter written to the future self of someone undergoing a memory wipe. (Fiction, obv)
- Melangell: The female saint with a message for the ages — “Today marks the feast day of Melangell, the 6th-century Welsh patron saint of hares, small animals, and the natural environment."
- Sprouts on a windowsill, not on subscription: the quiet radicalism of growing things — “Nothing radicalised me like growing vegetables."
- How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America — Marking the publication of a new biography. I drifted away from reading Doonesbury maybe a couple of decades ago when I stopped getting the print Guardian and an RSS feed for the strip vanished. I rediscovered it recently (RSS feed) and rather fortuitously the reruns have reached a point close to where I stopped back then. He’s only doing new Sundays these days but he’s still got it. One of the greats.
- What does a burst bubble actually look like? — Garbage Ryan looks at the dot.com bubble of our youths for clues as to the forthcoming, inevitable AI crash.
Looking:
- Sophie Green’s maximalist, technicolour vision of Britain’s fringes — For an exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation. “Many of these worlds sit outside mainstream visibility, not because they’re peripheral, but because they’re often overlooked or sometimes simplified in how they’re represented. What interested me was the richness within them – the kinship, humour, pride, devotion and rawness that exists inside these gatherings.”
- How a Houston company got its art on the walls of stoners across America — I had a feeling the Houston Blacklight & Poster Company had a connection with the underground comics boom but I must be thinking of a different poster producer. Are posters still a thing? They were a massive form of cultural dissemination when I was a youth.
- Dirty Little Zine libary — 8 page zines made with a simple online pagination tool. Throw your pics into it, add some text and boom, a printable little mag.