Status:

Feeling somewhat refreshed today with a curious mind so decided to sit in the garden and clear my browser tabs and in doing so exhausted my capacity for wordsmithery through commenting upon them. Enjoy.

Reading:

• Where to find the colors your screen can’t show you — A deep dive into how the digital colour spectrum (screens, cameras, etc) misses out a whole chunk of human-visible colours, why that is, and where to see those colours in the analogue world. But don’t try to photograph them, it won’t work.
• SUV buyers undeterred by warnings of risk to pedestrians, UK study finds — Depressing study notable for the term motornormativity where “buying whatever vehicle we like, and driving it wherever and whenever we please without having to think about the consequences for other people, has become normalised and ingrained across our society." We’ve all seen this. Perfectly nice, generous, empathetic people become utter monsters once they get behind a wheel. The psychological effect of motor vehicle ownership is henious.
• What’s the worst thing about having become a really old rockstar? — “The worst thing about being an old rockstar is that the old rockstar’s old fans don’t know how to work their fucking phones."
• To the Lifehouse! — Adam Greenfield’s report from a meetup of people running, as he defines them, “autonomous spaces organized as shelters against not merely the immediate, but also the second- and third-order consequences of climate-system collapse […], but also the infrastructure and supply-chain disruptions, the crop failures, the physical and psychic unwellness, and the social incapacity that follow on from all of that." It is my hope that we have some kind of Lifehouse functioning in Stirchley within the next couple of years. The people are here, just need the space.
• Small e-ink reader that changed my reading habit — A wallet-sized kindle-type reader for $70. If I was still on the move a lot I’d seriously consider something like this.
• How Canadian rock duo Angine de Poitrine play with neurobiology and physics to make viral music — A nice excuse to learn how music works.
• A woman who left society to live with bears weighs in on “Man or Bear” — Her conclusion is that men who are conditioned to mask their “hurt, loss, frustration, sadness and loneliness” are the dangerous onces because it’s released as anger. I was thinking this when watching John Harris' video from Makerfield (below) when he interviews the Restore Britain supporter. Hurt, loss, frustration, sadness and loneliness.
• Reissue of the Week: Mash Down Birmingham by Musical Youth — A nice chunk of history dispelling any misconceptions you might have about them being novelty one-hit wonders. One of the most Birmingham things to happen to me, shortly after I moved in with Fi, was coming home to find Dennis Seaton in our living room. (They went to college together.)

Watching:

• Burnham’s Britain: six days in the place that just changed our politics ‌(16:16) — John Harris' Anywhere but Westminster visits Makerfield. Been looking forward to this.

Listening:

• If books could kill: The body keeps the score — Interesting one, as this book came up a year back when I was thinking about whether my CFS might have a trauma-based cause. (The jury is still out — it’s probably a myriad of pre-existing conditions and experiences all interacting and amplified to a disabling level by long-Covid, and management is more pressing than identifying a past cause.) I never read it but the basic ideas — that trauma can be culumative over time without needing a dramatic event and that it can affect the physical body as much as a mind — were useful ones. So while it does turn out that the book is chock full of outdated, debunked theories, fabricated case studies and is clinically not good, it’s worth acknowledging, as the podcasters do, that is has helped a lot of people. A somewhat difficult listen and I’m not sure they got the tone right (this show is usually quite light) but I’m glad I know this now.
  • What the most famous book about trauma gets wrong — The article cited by the above. “The Body Keeps the Score stigmatizes survivors, blames victims, and depoliticizes violence. While masquerading as care for survivors, it creates a hierarchy in which marginalized victims are even more marginalized."

Music:

• BBC Radio 3’s Midsummer Dreaming — This starts soon after I expect to post this tonight so I haven’t listened yet, obviously, but I expect it to be great.
  • What Midsummer Dreaming reveals about the Vitality & Fragility of BBC Radio — a preview of the above with some sharp observations about the primacy the BBC gives to video over sound. “This weekend’s re-running of these landmark broadcasts … reminds me how rarely BBC audio treasures are made accessible. […] Although BBC Sounds is improving, there is still no streaming service for the corporation’s rich sound archives, and hardly any audio clips are streaming compared to the amount of old TV available." In fareness it’s not a problem unique to the BBC. The modern internet has never really figured out how to properly archive audio (with the exception of recorded music which had a pre-existing cataloguing tradition). Even in the piracy / shadow library arena it’s woefully underserved.